A support group for people who have found dead bodies faces change as member Gerry Waldron prepares to challenge its founder and transform it into a national expert resource.
Gerry Waldron carefully peeled a layer of tinfoil from a platter of sandwiches he had prepared at home. Simple ham and cheese, adventurous trout and cucumber.
Enough for everyone expected at the meeting. He paused to admire the precision-cut triangles of bread, then arranged a neat stack of printed agendas at the end of the table. He looked around the rented community hall, appreciating the perfectly arranged circle of chairs. He would have preferred a more intimate room, but a retirees' crime fiction club had beaten him to the booking.
It was Gerry's turn to chair the meeting, and he was determined to prove to his fellow members that he would make a far more enterprising leader than Grace Flynn. Grace had founded the group to offer support to members of the public who had discovered a dead body. Early risers, dog walkers, forest trekkers. Those nameless people you read about in the paper who come across a corpse.
In two years as secretary, during which he had felt more than a little sidelined, Gerry had fostered a more ambitious mission. He believed that under his rule the group could become the nation's preeminent Corpse Discovery Association, functioning not as a mere support group but as an expert resource, called upon whenever a person was missing and presumed dead.
He was convinced that it was a special gift, not blind chance, that had led him to discover the deceased on that fateful morning. Gerry checked his watch and sat down to review the running order of the meeting. He hoped to pass a motion to change the group's logo and had spent the better part of six weeks of evenings fine-tuning his proposed design on Microsoft Paint.
He was also expecting a new member, a Mr Anthony Gill, who had gotten in touch via Facebook. A new discovery was always exciting. Grace was happy to oversee the same old drivel every month. There was Derek Ryan's supposed post-traumatic stress, Arlene Breathnach's endless revisiting of the car park where she discovered a taxi driver in rigor mortis behind the wheel of a Nissan Juke, meter running to a triple-figure fare.
Gerry, on the other hand, consumed the news voraciously, on the lookout for tasty cases. He, like most of the country, was gripped by the story of a Kilkenny mother who had taken her two daughters and had not been seen for thirty-six hours. The photo released to the media showed a smiling woman in her early forties, with two sandy-haired girls in swimming costumes, standing by a picnic bench.
Gerry's solo orienteering excursions had taken him all over the country, and he recognized the backdrop as Cahermurphy Forest in County Clare. The public had been asked to be on high alert for a black Nissan Qashqai. His gift had yet to be triggered this time around, and it could not be forced. He filed the image in his mind, wondering if this might be the case that would finally put the group on the map.
The door opened and Grace entered, her trademark silk scarf on her neck, the ends of her shoulder-length grey hair chopped perfectly straight and her fringe covering her forehead in the style of Gerry's least favourite aunt. Grace's discovery was mundanity made flesh. Working as a community geriatric nurse, she had let herself into Annette Burlington's bungalow one afternoon and found the widow dead at the kitchen table.
The fact that Annette was sitting perfectly upright with her hands on her thighs and a cup of still-hot tea on the table was an interesting detail, but Gerry wondered if health workers should not be discounted from the group altogether. Surely death was par for their course? What next, police? Morticians?
He chuckled and made a mental note to raise this at a future meeting, including the line about morticians. Grace was flanked by Laurie O'Neill and Ray Brosnan. Laurie was in her late thirties and complained of a slow metabolism. The tragedy of her discovery was its ordinariness - a homeless man in a church doorway.
The only surprising detail was that she had found him after the hottest day of the year, rather than a usual winter exposure case. Ray's story was more colourful. A missing fly fisherman who had fallen from his skiff near Carrowteige, County Mayo, and floated past Ray's boat one morning, at the exact moment he had supposedly hooked the biggest trout of his life.
He let the fish go, though the same could not be said of his resentment of this supposed fact. Gerry stood to greet them, crossing the hall, his footsteps echoing on the wooden floor. Grace and Laurie exchanged a glance. Ray offered a thin smile, and his eye caught the table against the far wall.
Help yourself, Gerry said, extending a palm. Something special for you, Ray. Trout. He winked.
Plenty of biscuits too, Laurie. Fox's, Laurie asked, and Gerry suggested she find out for herself. She smiled and hurried to the table, overtaking Ray, and put four Crunch Creams, at least one more than a decorous quota, on to a napkin. The little details, Gerry thought, smiling.
So much for Grace and her plate of Rich Tea. As the meeting got underway, Gerry could not shake the image of the missing mother and her children. He knew that the group had the potential to be so much more than a circle of armchair sympathizers. With his leadership and his keen eye for newsworthy cases, the Corpse Discovery Association would soon become a name that authorities and journalists alike would turn to.
Grace might have founded the group, but Gerry intended to reinvent it. The missing family from Kilkenny, wherever they were, might just be the catalyst that launched his grand ambition
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