These are the opening chapters of Grave Expectations – the third book in the Cremains comedy caper series.

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CHAPTER ONE

There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in a crematorium furnace that we were going to turn up at a funeral with “JUST CROAKED” scrawled across the rear window of the hearse and a whole bunch of tin cans and balloons tied to the back bumper.

I mean, what sort of sick bastard would do something like that on the day of somebody’s funeral? What sort of sick bastard? Well, I know exactly what sort of sick bastard would do that, and his name’s Edgar Shithead Ackroyd. Not that his middle name is actually Shithead, of course, although it sure as hell should be. He and his two gormless sons, Ray and Roy, had been plaguing us for weeks over what might be called an undertakers’ turf war, and was one of the main reasons that “Max Dempsey and Partners: Funeral Directors” was once again struggling to make ends meet.

That’s me, by the way. Max Dempsey. My real name’s Simon Golightly, though, which was absolutely fine when I was a bank manager, but didn’t sound right at all when I was embarking on my subsequent but short-lived career as a bank robber. And even when we’d taken over Danny Bishop’s undertaker business about seven months ago, I decided to stick with Max Dempsey, mainly because I just preferred it.

Anyway, back to the turf war. “Edgar Ackroyd and Sons” were the only other undertakers in the area apart from us, and they’d stop at nothing to damage our business and steal our clients. Their usual trick was to do something to the hearse to make sure we were late to the funeral service, such as letting its tyres down or boxing it in with two other vehicles to stop us getting out. The latest “JUST CROAKED” ploy was a new one, but fortunately it had only been done in some kind of chalky paint, so it didn’t take long to wipe it off. What took a lot more time was untying all the tin cans and balloons.

I suppose you might reasonably expect that a turf “war” would involve at least two sets of combatants, but that’s not exactly the case if I’m being totally honest. Turf massacre might be a more accurate description. The thing is, you see, we wouldn’t have dared to retaliate, whatever the Ackroyds threw at us. For starters, rumour had it that Daddy Ackroyd had some pretty close connections with a few of the more unsavoury members of the criminal underworld. Names such as Billy “The Butcher” McNally, Jack “Hacksaw” Higgins and Tony “Psycho” Vincenzi had been bandied about from time to time, and I hadn’t the slightest intention of testing out whether the rumour was true or not. And then there were the junior Ackroyds, Ray and Roy, who were twins, and although not at all identical, were both ugly as fuck in their own particular ways. More to the point, and where they were very much alike, they both had far more muscles than brains, and each had done time for some rather nasty cases of grievous bodily harm.

As for our side, I’m late forties, a pound or two overweight and have a long-standing and deep-rooted aversion to pain. Other than me, though, Alan and Scratch looked as if they could handle themselves perfectly well if it ever came to any physical unpleasantness. On paper at least. Alan, for instance, had been an “almost champion” weightlifter in his younger days but had had to retire due to a serious neck injury, or so he claimed. The upshot was that he frequently resorted to wearing a padded neck brace, which he reckoned excused him from most forms of manual labour or a common or garden punch-up.

On the other hand, you might well assume that Scratch was more than capable of holding his own in a scrap. Well above average height with a powerfully muscular physique to match, the shaved head and busted nose made him look like a right thug, but appearances, as they say, can be deceptive. He’d cross the road to avoid stepping on so much as an ant, and I’d never seen him even swat a fly in all the years I’d known him. This proverbial gentle giant also had almost every allergy known to medical science. Whatever it was, if you could touch it, smell it or swallow it, it was odds on that Scratch would come out in a rash. Hence the nickname.

His driving abilities, however, were second to none, and these were precisely what we needed right now as we finished untying the last of the tin cans and piled into the hearse. Scratch floored the accelerator, and we shot off up the street with the screech of rubber on tarmac. If we were going to make it to the bereaved family’s home in time, we’d need to be breaking a few speed limits.

‘This is crazy,’ said Alan, who was sandwiched between me and Scratch on the bench seat at the front of the hearse. ‘We can’t keep letting Ackroyd and his lads get away with this sort of shit.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘Any suggestions?’

‘Well, how about we hire some heavies to give them a bit of grief? Get ’em to back off and stop poaching our customers for a start.’

‘Heavies, eh? And pay them with what? We’re borderline skint, as you very well know.’

‘Which is at least partly down to the Ackroyds, as you very well know.’

It was a fair enough point, of course, but even if we could afford to, I could only imagine what the repercussions might be if we escalated our side of the turf war, so I didn’t respond. Nor did Scratch, who was presumably too busy concentrating on the road ahead as we hurtled along, turning quite a few heads at the sight of a hearse racing past at fifty miles an hour in a thirty zone. Possibly that, or more likely he didn’t have any answers either.

CHAPTER TWO

The funeral had gone off OK as it turned out, but the fee we’d got was a piss in the ocean as far as our financial crisis was concerned. In fact, the outlook was so bleak that Alan, Scratch and I had even started talking about getting back into our old career as a sideline to try and get a much needed injection of cash. Not that you could really call it a career as such because we were pretty shit at the whole bank robbing business. And like somebody once said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

But then something weird happened. Just a few hours after our most recent little chat about returning to a life of crime, in walks this woman and says, ‘I need a coffin.’

OK, that’s not particularly weird in itself, given that selling coffins is a big part of what we do, and apart from the one we’d used for yesterday’s funeral, we hadn’t sold a single one in weeks. No, the weird part came a little later, but bear with me if you will, and I’ll get to it soon.

I’m sitting behind the reception desk at the funeral parlour, sifting through the morning mail, and I look up to see this woman who’s knocking six feet tall and slim as a catwalk model. She’s wearing a well-faded denim jacket and she’s got lightish brown hair with a tinge of red. I’m guessing she’d be about early forties and, as far as I could tell, no stranger to a healthy lifestyle. So when she says ‘I need a coffin’, I smile up at her and say, ‘Not from where I’m sitting, you don’t.’

Hand on heart, I’ve no idea why I said it and instantly wished my gob had a rewind button. I certainly hadn’t meant to sound flirty – which is very probably the way it came across – and besides, it’s not the sort of remark you’d normally expect from a funeral director when you were no doubt grieving over the loss of a loved one and all you were after was a bloody coffin.

‘What?’ she said.

I got to my feet, feeling the heat glowing in my cheeks. ‘Er, sorry. I thought you were someone else.’

She arched an eyebrow at me like she knew full well I was bullshitting, then perched herself on one of the two seats on the opposite side of the reception desk. ‘You do sell coffins, I presume?’

She waved an arm in the general direction of the dozen or so display coffins in the main body of the funeral parlour, and I sat myself back down again.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, desperately trying to assume my well-practised sombre-but-friendly undertaker expression. ‘May I ask who the deceased might be? A family member perhaps?’

‘Deceased?’ She asked the question as if it was as inappropriate as my earlier comment.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘No. No deceased. There isn’t one.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Don’t tell me there’s some kind of law that I can’t buy a coffin unless I’ve got a dead body to go in it.’

‘Not at all. It’s just a little… unusual, that’s all, but as you can see, we have an excellent range of coffins on display and also a brochure with—’

‘What’s your cheapest?’

‘Obviously not a big fan of whoever it is she’s planning on burying.’

(That was the voice in my head, by the way, and not what I actually said. And to be clear, it’s only ever the one voice. It’s not as if I get all kinds of weird satanic voices ordering me to commit unspeakable acts or anything like that. I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking.)

We never actually had our cheapest coffin out on display – or the Skinflint Special as we liked to call it – because we didn’t want to encourage the tightarses, so I opened a desk drawer to take out one of our glossy brochures. But when I passed it to her, she ignored it completely and simply stared at me with what could only be described as a knowing smile. Not just stared, but pointed at me as well with a long and scarily red fingernail.

‘Don’t I recognise you from somewhere?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

‘Wait a second and let me think.’

With that, she closed her eyes and switched her pointing finger to rhythmically tapping it on the top of the desk.

While I waited in silence as instructed, I scoured my brain cells for any memory that I may have come across her before but came up with a resounding blank. As it turned out, though, I could easily be forgiven for failing to recognise her.

‘That’s it!’ she said as her pale green eyes popped open and she slapped her palm down onto the desktop. ‘You were wearing a mask at the time and the rest of your face was covered with dust, but I’m sure it was you.’

‘What the fuck is she talking about?’ said the voice in my head.

She leaned forward towards me. ‘It’s all in the eyes.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid you’ve lost me.’

‘Oh surely you must remember. Must have been about eight or nine months ago. Bit more perhaps. You drilled a bloody great hole into my dungeon from the basement of the shop next door. How could you forget something like that?’

Dungeon? Bloody hell. It was her. Miss Whiplash or whatever she called herself. It was our last catastrophic attempt at bank robbery before it finally dawned on us that we weren’t cut out for that sort of thing at all. Alan, Scratch and I had rented an empty shop with the intention of drilling into the vault of the bank next door except Alan had got the wrong sodding wall, and instead we ended up in a veritable Aladdin’s cave of whips, chains and a shitload of other S&M paraphernalia. ‘Who’s been a naughty boy then?’ is what she’d said to me when I’d poked my head through the hole and she’d damn near caught me with a crack of her whip.

‘I see from the way you’ve suddenly turned a rather unattractive shade of pale that it’s all coming back to you now,’ she said.

And with it, the soul-crushing recollection of failure and toe-curling embarrassment.

‘Christ. Was that you?’

The woman gave a sly smirk. ‘Hardly surprising you didn’t recognise me. I was presumably wearing my work clothes at the time.’

‘Work clothes?’

‘Black leather mostly. Probably a black leather mask and black wig as well.’

I didn’t remember the details, but it certainly explained why I hadn’t made the connection with the woman sitting across the desk from me. I also couldn’t have foreseen how this chance encounter might lead to such a potentially lucrative partnership.

END OF OPENING CHAPTERS

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