The Casual Vacancy

transformation in Pagford’s collective mind by his drowning, that he was spoken of everywhere as a water baby, a cherub, a pure and gentle angel whom all would have embraced with love and compassion, if only they could have saved him.
    But the needle and the flame had had no transformative effect upon Krystal’s reputation; on the contrary, they had fixed her permanently in the mind of Old Pagford as a soulless creature whose pursuit of what the elderly liked to call kicks had led to the death of an innocent child.)
    Shirley was pulling on her coat.
    ‘You realize, I actually saw them that day?’ she said, her cheeks turning pink. ‘The boy bawling by one clump of bushes, and Krystal Weedon and Stuart Wall in another—’
    ‘
Did you?
And were they really …?’ asked Maureen avidly.
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Shirley. ‘Broad daylight. Open air. And the boy was right by the river when I saw him. A couple of steps and he’d have been in.’
    Something in Maureen’s expression stung her.
    ‘I was hurrying,’ said Shirley with asperity, ‘because Howard had said he was feeling poorly and I was worried sick. I didn’t want to go out at all, but Miles and Samantha had sent Lexie over – I think, if you want my honest opinion, they’d had a row – and then Lexie wanted to visit the café – I was absolutely distracted, and all I could think was,
I must get back to Howard …
I didn’t actually
realize
what I’d seen until much later … and the dreadful thing,’ said Shirley, her colour higher than ever, and returning again to her favourite refrain, ‘is that if Krystal Weedon hadn’t let that child wander off while she was having her fun in the bushes, the ambulance would have reached Howard so much more quickly. Because, you know, with two of them coming … things got confu—’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Maureen, interrupting as they moved out towards the car, because she had heard all this before. ‘You know, I can’t
think
why they’re having the service here in Pagford …’
    She longed to suggest that they drive past the church on the way to the hospital – she had a craving to see what the Weedon family looked like en masse, and to glimpse, perhaps, that degenerate junkie mother – but could think of no way to frame the request.
    ‘You know, there’s one comfort, Shirley,’ she said, as they set off for the bypass. ‘The Fields are as good as gone. That must be a comfort to Howard. Even if he can’t attend council for a while, he got that done.’
    Andrew Price was speeding down the steep hill from Hilltop House, with the sun hot on his back and the wind in his hair. His week-old shiner had turned yellow and green, and looked, if possible, even worse than it had when he had turned up at school with his eye almost closed. Andrew had told the teachers who enquired that he had fallen off his bike.
    It was now the Easter holidays, and Gaia had texted Andrew the previous evening to ask whether he would be going to Krystal’s funeral the next day. He had sent an immediate ‘ yes ’, and was now dressed, after much deliberation, in his cleanest jeans and a dark grey shirt, because he did not own a suit.
    He was not very clear why Gaia was going to the funeral, unless it was to be with Sukhvinder Jawanda, to whom she seemed to cling more fondly than ever, now that she was moving back to London with her mother.
    ‘Mum says she should never have come to Pagford,’ Gaia had told Andrew and Sukhvinder happily, as the three of them sat on the low wall beside the newsagent’s at lunchtime. ‘She knows Gavin’s a total twat.’
    She had given Andrew her mobile number and told him that they would go out together when she came to Reading to see her father, and even mentioned, casually, taking him to see some of her favourite places in London, if he visited. She was showering benefits around her in the manner of a demob-happy soldier, and these promises, made so lightly, gilded the prospect of Andrew’s own move. He had greeted the news that his parents had had an offer on Hilltop House with at least as much excitement as pain.
    The sweeping turn into Church Row, usually made with an uplift of spirits, dampened them. He could see people moving around in the graveyard, and he wondered what this funeral was going to be like, and for the first time that morning thought of Krystal Weedon in more than the abstract.
    A memory, long buried in the deepest recesses of his mind, came back to him, of