Human Remains

frame of reference for this. My mother had suffered a stroke. Yes, she was housebound. Yes, she was elderly and frail. But aside from that, and the chest infection, she hadn’t been seriously ill at all. Only yesterday she’d been muttering some complaint about the prime minister while I cooked her dinner and put the shopping away.
    I tried to remember the last thing she’d said to me. Had she even said goodbye? When was the last time I’d said something nice to her? Asked her how she felt, if she was happy? When was the last time I’d told her I loved her?
    ‘I feel as if I should be crying, but I don’t feel like I can,’ I said.
    ‘You don’t have to do anything,’ he said. ‘And besides, it will take a long time for you to process all this.’
    ‘What does that mean?’ I snapped. ‘I’m not a manufacturing plant, I’m a human being. I’m not going to “process” anything at all. I’m not going to come to terms with it, get over it or deal with it. I’m just going to carry on with my life because that’s all I am able to do, the same as I’ve always done.’
    He made a noise like a sigh and was about to say something, but stopped himself and drank the rest of his coffee instead.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said, a few minutes later.
    He shrugged. ‘No probs. Just trying to help.’
    ‘So I guess your office went a bit mad after that phone call yesterday, right?’
    ‘You could say that.’
    ‘Is this the end of the Love Your Neighbour campaign?’
    He laughed. ‘I don’t think that was ever going to go anywhere. It was turning into more of a Spy On Your Neighbour or Moan About Your Neighbour campaign anyway.’
    ‘Well, that’s more the British way of doing things, I suppose.’
    There was a short silence.
    ‘Are they going to check their computers?’
    I looked at him. He was crossing a line.
    ‘Oh, go on,’ he said. ‘It’s a very general question. I thought maybe they’d all been accessing suicide chatrooms or something. Might be a link between them?’
    ‘I’d be surprised if they all had computers. Some of them were quite elderly, don’t forget.’
    ‘You’re including the elderly ones?’
    ‘Well,
I
am. It’s up to the Senior Investigating Officer if he takes any notice of what I have to say.’
    He looked into his empty coffee mug. Mine was still half-full, but I had no desire to finish it. It was like drinking dirty water.
    ‘I don’t think they killed themselves,’ I said. ‘At least, not in the way we usually think of suicides. It wasn’t a deliberate act. It was more of a… as if they just gave up.’
    ‘Is that even possible?’
    ‘It must be.’
    ‘But surely your body would override that decision, wouldn’t it? Surely hunger – thirst – aren’t they primal forces? You would have to have a completely iron will to just sit down and starve yourself to death.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Because of the phone call we can be reasonably sure now that someone or something is behind all this – I’m thinking that all these people had something done to them to force them to do this, something that has overridden their human instincts in some way.’
    He sat forward in his chair. ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is very interesting.’
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘What could do that? What could override the basic human instinct?’
    ‘I have no idea.’
    ‘Scary, though, isn’t it?’ he said.
    I nodded, not entirely sure what he meant.
    ‘Scary that someone out there could do this,’ he went on. ‘I mean, we could all be victims, couldn’t we?’
    I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Well, although there wasn’t anything obvious linking them, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have things in common. They all lived on their own, for a start. None of them had jobs, for one reason or another.’
    ‘You’re still talking about a very considerable slice of the population,’ said Sam.
    ‘You want to go out and warn everyone who lives on their own and doesn’t have a job?’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because you’d send them all into a panic.’
    We were both picturing a hysterical mass of single people, and it raised a smile.
    ‘The demographics are interesting,’ he said, changing the subject neatly back to the bodies.
    ‘Because they’re so varied?’
    ‘Exactly. I mean, if someone’s getting some sort of kick out of this? I don’t know, it’s just so weird. What does he have to gain from it? Did they leave wills, or anything