Daisy-Chain

Sarah would never forget the sound that Neil’s spade made as it hit the side of the coffin. It was halfway between a thud and a scrape and very different from the gritty, ringing sound that the digging had made just before. Sarah had been helping Neil to dig up the flagstones, not by actually digging, there was only one spade, but by running inside and fetching Cokes and ice-lollies whenever Neil looked hot or thirsty. Sarah’s Dad said that Neil was “a fat twat” and that meant that he shouldn’t drink cans of Coke, but Neil liked Coke and Sarah liked Neil, so she brought him all the Cokes he wanted.

To be fair, it was really hot and Neil had been at it for at least two hours. Sarah knew because she had listened to the whole of Queen’s Greatest Hits twice while she tried to revise with her feet in the paddling pool. She was just sticking the latest Now That’s What I Call Music 12 CD into her portable Walkman when the thud happened.

She looked up and saw Neil, his face red and confused as he dropped the spade, kneeled down and began to move the sandy soil around with his hands. She stood up then, her feet slapping a dark, wet, grey trail across the last of the scorching flagstones as she watched Neil revealing a flat, brown, wooden surface. Neil’s face got even redder then, til’ it was absolutely the colour of a Coke can, before suddenly going really pale around his lips.

“Sarah love, go fetch your Mother,” he croaked as he stumble-squatted backwards, landing heavily on a pile of stones behind him. Sarah wondered briefly if her Dad was right and if Neil’s “heart attack waiting to happen” was going to take place right her and now, before shouting, “Mum!” loudly in the direction of the kitchen.

“Don’t scream Sarah - Oh! Christ! Everything okay? Neil?” Sarah’s Mum was standing at the double doors looking like a proper 1950s housewife: marigolds, headscarf, apron, dusting cloth, the works.

She was still wearing the rubber gloves when she called the police five minutes later, her yellow-clad finger prodding shakily at the phone.

“Yes, no, not an emergency. No, but um, there’s a ummm - there appears to be a coffin in our back garden… Well a box then, a wooden box in the shape of a… No, it’s not ours… No, my boyfriend just, he just dug it up… digging a pond. Right. Yes, well it’s 37 Maze Hill Lane, Greenwich. Right opposite the park… Yes. Yes. Thank you.”

“What did they say, Mum?”

“Nothing, love, they’re on their way. How’s Neil?”

Neil was swigging from a can and prodding at the exposed earth with his shovel, a sort of portly middle-aged Diet Coke man, except without the diet part.

It took the police an unbelievably long time to arrive and as they waited, the three of them, Neil, Sarah and Sarah’s Mum, stood around the coffin, mostly staring. Occasionally they knocked on it, or crouched down to get a closer look. It was smallish, a child sized box. If Sarah and her Mum had still been living in Wandsworth, the neighbours would have been round in a flash to see, offering to help and biscuits, but here they didn’t know anyone. Besides, “Hello, I’m Annie, this is Neil and this is my daughter Sarah, would you like to come see our coffin?” didn’t seem like the best of ice-breakers.

…

When the police did finally get there, at around three, they blazed in with sirens blaring, storming the place as if it were a bank robbery. By then Sarah had retreated upstairs for a loo break and came dashing down just in time to see a police-constable, hammer in fist, first prising, then smashing open the top of the box, while another P.C. took photographs and a third took notes. Neil stood well back, hands on hips, eyes narrowed and Sarah’s Mum, put her arm out for Sarah to come in for a hug. They held each other as they watched as the chief police-constable, silver badges glinting, wrangle the lid off to reveal a filthy, red-velvet linin. Nestled in the middle was what looked like a small brown fur coat with teeth with a collapsed ribcage, shrunken skull and sunken holes for eyes. Closer inspection revealed little, tiny claws and paws. Sarah’s first thought was that it was a mole. But why on earth would someone bury a mole? The skin wasn’t quite brown, but a mottled red and where the sun hit, it shone a dirty copper. It was lying on it’s side, all four paws pointing in one direction, teeth bared.

The police all looked at each other and then the constable coughed.

“Ma’am it appears to be a dog”.

“Yes,” said Sarah’s Mum, “I can see that”. Neil said nothing.

“Right then,” said the constable and he nodded to his colleagues.

“But, officer, please what do we do with…?’

“Dispose of it as you see fit, Ma’am.” With that, they headed back through the house out the front door and into their car and blared off into the Saturday afternoon.

“Well what the hell do we do now?”

Sarah’s Mum twanged her rubber gloves back on aggressively.

“Pop it in the skip, I suppose,” said Neil as cheerily as he could, but she’d already turned and was marching up towards the double doors of the kitchen. Sarah was still peering into the box. She picked up the spade and was, without really knowing why, pressing the handle into the dog’s sagging skin. It moved like an old duvet with a gentle resistance. She lifted one of the little paws and that’s when she noticed what looked like a black leather booklet, no bigger than her hand sticking out at an angle. The dog was lying on top of it. Before Neil could see, she pulled the booklet from the box and hid it behind her back, slipping it into the waist band of her leggings.

“Here, Sarah, give us a hand, grab that will you?” Neil was lifting one of the smaller flagstones and signalling towards the new wheelbarrow propped up against the garden fence. Bent slightly forwards so as to keep the booklet wedged in her waistband, she duly delivered the wheelbarrow to Neil before heading back into her bedroom.

Once she upstairs, with the curtains shut, she took out the black book. Her eyes played tricks on her, throwing up pulsating bright green sparks that you only get when you go from somewhere very bright into somewhere very dark. It was hard, but she gradually managed to tease open the pages of the book with her fingernails. The smell was mushroomy and dense but the pictures inside were clear enough. They showed sketches. Sketches of trees and buildings and people and flowers. On one of the pages, pressed blossom and dried grasses tumbled out. Some pages were marked with the initials N.B. and some had dates. All were made in a kind of brown pen ink.

The sketches started off scrappy and faint but seemed to grow more confident. Towards the back of the book there were sketches of a puppy. It was a pretty little thing, a spaniel, with flappy ear and big, round, wet eyes. Under one of the puppy sketches was written “Cherry” and the date, 1888. What Sarah found when she opened one of the penultimate pages, however, made her gasp. There, in place of the soft brown ink drawings was a heavy black scrawl. Smears and blots spreading over the middle of both pages. The words were mostly indecipherable to Sarah but several words stood out, written in block capitals: POISON and FORGIVE and I’LL SHOW HIM, THE DEVIL. There was a sketch of a dog collar and a huge oak tree with a distinctive hole half way up, next to a brick wall. There was an arrow pointing to a crevice in the tree and then the last two pages of the book were mottled brown, but blank. Sarah hid the book under the floorboards of her bedroom and never looked at it again.

…

That is until February 2020 when Sarah, aged 46, moved back in with her mother in Maze Hill to help out with the big move. Neil had died the year before of a long overdue heart-attack and Sarah, keen to do the right thing, had offered to help her Mum clear out their home. Sarah had anticipated a short stay but 2020 had other plans. One day, when sanding down the floor in her old bedroom, Sarah had remembered something and knocked gently on one of the boards as the ghost of a memory skittered across her brain. Her fingers found the notches in the wood and before she had time to focus, there in front of her was the book with it’s dimpled black cover. This time Sarah started at the back. A huge, leering tree, gash halfway up greeted her. Next, more forcefully then she remembered, the pages of writing. This time, glasses perched on her nose, she was determined to read the words but still they evaded her again, apart from POISON, FORGIVE and DEVIL. But the sketch was clear enough and they spoke in a language that Sarah understood.

In the months of lockdown, Sarah had had the time to scour every last inch of Greenwich Royal Park as one of the gates opened opposite her mother’s home. As soon as she saw the sketch, with a prickle in her spine she immediately recognised the tree in the drawing. She knew it from the particular diamond cleft just to the right of centre. Sarah grabbed a her bag, her mask and slung a painting ladder over her shoulder. She crossed the road into the the park, turning right, people gawping at her as though she were a robber. She knew just where she was headed - there, behind the old chestnut was the particular oak that she was searching for. A huge hole, the size of a large boulder a quarter of way up its’ trunk, diamond shaped. Sarah took out the antique notebook from her jacket pocket, she opened it and with one eye shut she lined up the tree with the wall. A perfect match, albeit a little broader and higher.

Looking over her shoulder for any park wardens, she propped the ladder against the trunk and climbed up, no higher than six feet before poking first her right-leg, then her left, into the hole and wriggling her way in. The space widened as she dropped deeper, and she just managed to wedge herself against the trees’ inner edges. It was damp and the air was heavy and pungent. Sarah pulled her t-shirt over her mouth. All around, tiny holes let in shafts of light like a thousand lanterns. Beneath her, a sudden brilliant gold flashed. Instinctively Sarah reached downwards and slipped as she grabbed at the soft earth. Her fingers wrapped around something palm-width, like a chestnut, solid and weighty.

She easily managed to pull herself out and swing her leg over a nearby branch. There she unfurled her fingers to reveal the golden box. Sarah, knew, even before she put her glasses on that this was worth something, It had the right kind of weight and it rattled. Sitting on a branch, Sarah popped on her glasses and opened it up. There, inside, was a solid gold dog tag marked “Daisy”. Just beneath that was a man’s signet ring with two stags and a serpent, the front had been horribly defaced but the ruby eyes of the serpent were still intact. Finally a woman’s diamond ring with an enormous stone and three smaller diamonds on each side. Easily with £20,000. Sarah slipped them into her pocket and carefully made her way down the ladder, though the gate and back to her mother’s home.