Human Remains

hadn’t quite managed to get out of the habit when I was over there.
    Her house was an old Victorian terrace just outside the town centre. Still parked outside was her old Nissan Micra, rusting to pieces and yet she insisted on taxing and insuring it just in case she suddenly felt the urge to leave the house. I pulled in behind it and sat for a moment, savouring the feeling of being alone, being quiet.
    I opened the front door with my key, which I kept on a separate key ring as a kind of message to myself that this wasn’t a permanent arrangement. ‘Only me, Mum!’ I called. From the back room I could hear the sound of her television, loud – one of the soaps, as it always was at this time of the evening.
    ‘Hello, dear,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Can you turn the thermostat up a little bit? Getting a bit chilly.’
    I reached over her head and twisted the dial until I heard the ‘whoomph’ of the gas boiler in the kitchen firing up again.
    ‘I got you one of those carton soups,’ I said. ‘Broccoli and stilton.’
    She pulled a face but said, ‘Alright, dear. If it needs eating up.’
    It was my favourite, this one. I opened the spout and put it in the microwave, even though she always made a fuss if I didn’t do it in a saucepan. The small pan was in the sink, crusted hard with what looked like scrambled egg that she’d made for her breakfast. While I was waiting for the soup I ran the hot tap into the pan and squeezed a jet of washing up liquid into it. I stopped the microwave before the telltale ping and stirred the soup into a bowl, added it to a tray with a buttered wholemeal roll on a plate, and took it through to her.
    ‘No white rolls?’ she said plaintively.
    ‘The Co-op didn’t have any,’ I fibbed. ‘Anyway, wholemeal’s better for you. You need more fibre, Mum, especially if you’re having scrambled eggs every day.’
    She’d gone back to the television.
    I washed up, scrubbing the pan clean and wishing she would at least leave it in to soak, and then I cleaned the kitchen surfaces. After that, I went back into the living room. She’d eaten all the soup, despite claiming not to like it.
    ‘While you’re here,’ she said, ‘can you have a look for my bank book?’
    There was usually a ‘while you’re here’ moment, invariably just as I had my coat on and was about to leave.
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘The savings one.’
    I went through to the other room and opened the top drawer of the dresser, where she kept her expired passport, driving licence, guarantee certificates and instruction manuals for every electrical item she’d purchased in the last thirty years – all the documents of life she was never going to need again, and buried underneath them the ones that she would: building society passbooks, her disabled badge, family photographs.
    ‘Mum, it’s right here.’
    I looked at the open drawer, at the passbook right on the top where it never was – and noticed how everything in there was neat and tidy, as though someone had had a good old clear-out . She must have done it herself, put some order into the chaos for once, and forgotten all about it.
    She was getting old and forgetful, I found myself thinking as I took the book through to her. Until now she’d always been sharp as a pin even though physically she was frail. How much longer would she be able to cope in her own house, even with me coming in to check on her?
     

Briarstone Chronicle
     
    April
Body of Missing Rachelle Found in Baysbury Home
     
    Police called to a flat in Baysbury village on Tuesday night were shocked to discover the decomposed remains of Rachelle Hudson, 21, who was reported missing from her Hampshire home last December.
    Neighbours told of seeing a young woman moving into the property early in the New Year, but had assumed she had moved out again as they had not seen her after that. ‘We went round to say hello, but she didn’t invite us in,’ Paula Newman, 33, told us. ‘She seemed busy. We didn’t knock again and when we didn’t see her after a while we thought she’d gone. I can’t believe she was in there the whole time.’
    Miss Hudson’s family reported that Rachelle left the family home in Fareham after an argument. She had been suffering from depression for some time. It is not known why she decided to move to Baysbury, nor how she died. Her body was only discovered when police were alerted by the private landlords of the property in Balham Drive, after rent