The Corpse Seeker’s Picnic

by Ian Johnson

“Darling, did you get the hummus?” she asks to ask.

“Of course,” I lie, knowing what she really means.

“The jalapeno one? From Waitrose?” my wife Wendy opens the fridge to confirm that I didn’t.

“No, not that one. I didn’t go that way.”

“Yes, you did. It’s right next to your badminton club.”

I smooth the Ordnance Survey map splayed across the kitchen table, pockmarked with X’s and shading, dates and annotations. I make a show of cross-referencing the topography with the multi-coloured spreadsheet on my propped laptop: green for a thorough sweep; orange for a cursory recce; red for ‘to seek’.

“I forgot, Wendy, sorry.”

Florence looks on disapprovingly from the framed photograph on the counter in a blazer and hornet-striped tie, her tight smile dimpling the birthmark she had wanted removed. The frozen moment was twenty years old - the last picture taken of her, beyond the forensic artist's impressions. Our daughter died before she was pretty. She would have, without a doubt. She had her mother’s razor cheekbones, my baby blues. The overbite was a phase, and the brace was helping, as much as she railed, refusing to wear it to school, which we discovered from her form tutor, and insisted on dropping her off and picking her up as penance, withholding bus money, until she decided on that morning to leave early and walk the five miles along the tow path, through the underpass, skirting the back road, the farmer’s field, in the driving rain, and into the ether, and gone forever.

Wendy slumps opposite, wringing the thermos lid that seals piping hot tomato and basil soup. “How could you forget?”

“Because I’m not perfect, darling. I’m merely good enough.”

“Stop with the bollocks, Phil. I won’t have that robot talk at home.”

“Very well.”

I shoot her a grin to make peace, the one Flo’ called ‘cringe’. It made them both furious.

“You do have a temper, Phil. You do.”

“Mm-hmm. I’ve worked on myself. I -- ”

“You had a temper with Flo’.”

I give a head wobble, ceding ground. Sometimes.

“You were angry that morning, when she didn’t come down for breakfast.”

I study a squared parcel of terrain, clearing my throat, manifesting swelling rage, for Wendy’s benefit.

“I was.”

“You said -- ”

“I said I would kill her when I caught up to her, yes. Yes, I did say that, didn’t I? Do you want to take a detour for that hummus you like, darling?”

She spreads her thin-skinned hand under my scouring gaze, as to a lifeboat captain. I take it, squeezing.

“No, it’s fine,” she struggles through quivering lips.

“Okay. So, the plan today is the North Yorkshire moors here, just west of Goathland. It's tricky to get to, but we’ll take it steady, and you have your new wellies with the orthopaedic insoles. We’ll work our way up here and have our picnic. Then, if there’s time before dark, I thought we might drive into Robin Hood’s Bay? Maybe even have a fish supper?”

“Do you remember rock pooling there with Flo’? Her in her sailor’s outfit and that yellow fisherman’s hat?”

“Yes. A seagull took her jam sandwich, and she tried to bop it with a spade. She was always a wilful little -- ”

“What about Briar Wood?”

My wife points to a triangular clump, redacted by black scribble.

“Wendy...”

“It’s just so close, Phil. To the back roads and the fields. And there was that sighting of a man with a van parked up, looking for something in -- ”

“Wendy, the police have searched there over and over. They strongly suspect the van was Tommy Price but, the sighting, it was weeks later, and he took his… dates there.”

“Young girls.”

“Still, girls in the world, Wendy. All accounted for. The things he did to them, he’s served time for.”

“Ha! Don’t remind me! He’s out breathing the same air as us. Free to have a family. Free to raise children.”

I creak vertical, busying myself with an audit of the bursting wicker basket.

“You... you thought, like me, they didn’t look properly. And... and my friend, our new neighbour Sharon at number ten. She has an Alsatian. An ex-police dog.”

“It’s a failed police dog. It didn’t pass its exams and what-have-you because it was too stupid.”

“Yes, but there is some instinct, surely. Some...”

Her voice crumbles. I stand behind, rubbing her arms frantically, reminding her of our symmetry in sensation. 

“I just wish you’d got the flipping hummus, Phil. You’re at that badminton club enough.”

“Sorry, Wendy. Next time.”

*****

On the third day, Tommy cracked and asked for Lucozade. He said his grandmother would buy him one when he wasn’t well, and he really didn’t feel well anymore.

At the supermarket, I bought him a tube of Pringles and a whole Swiss roll, which I’d brought home for Florence when those nasty girls christened her’ metal mouth’, then every time she’d endured that slur – just us at the table, her scowl receding with heaped clownish chatter and calorific carbs.

But it was misplaced. He no longer had teeth to eat.

*****

The handle of a badminton racket I pointedly kept on the passenger seat jabs Wendy in the side. “Can you not keep this in the frigging boot?”

“Between the metal detector and the shovels, there’s hardly -- ”

“Don’t you think three times a week at your little club is a bit much?”

“Well... I’m retired now, too. I have to do something to fill my days.”

“Or someone.”

We drive in silence. The steering wheel shushes under my suede gloves.

“And you’ve put on weight,” Wendy blurts. “How is that possible?”

“Thank you, darling.”

I watch her grimace in the rear-view mirror, her eyes filling. I reach across and pat her thigh. She lets me rest my hand there, still throbbing from the hairline fracture I increasingly suspect.

“Do you promise not to be mad?” I venture.

She shrugs with simmering petulance, an echo of Flo’.

“I booked us a hotel. At Robin Hood’s Bay. I thought it would break up the driving, at least.”

“This isn’t a holiday.”

“No. No, of course not.”

Wendy fishes her stash of sucking mints from the footwell, feeding me an unwrapped pearl and conceding, “It might be nice.”

*****

I couldn’t cry in front of him. I’d resolved not to, taking my time, my spine ballasted by the slabbed concrete outside the Second World War air raid shelter, shrouded with toxic hogweed, invaded with fat rats, submerged by the stinking river in wetter months. Wendy and I had seen it, and marked it, and came back to explore the following June. Another empty hollow, but it abided within me - a practical fantasy of a stonehearted monk attending to his rituals.

But the smell of him on day five. The state he was in, half obliterated. His own ragged sobs. So, we cried together a while, the bloodied hammer a flaccid centrepiece.

I freshened his duct tape, his bandages, his bucket. I cupped his matted fontanelle and bottle-fed him Lucozade, his impotent smashed hands guiding his wants.

“People will look for me,” he gurgled, pleading through a pulped eye. “Me brother. Me Gran.”

“I want that for them,” I there there’d.

*****

The going is soft, the purple-crowned moors moist with day-old rain. I match her snail pace, looking fastidiously, poking with my trusty shovel at new growth, loose dirt, discolouration.

Wendy swings the flat ear of the metal detector, slow and circular, keeping the dry-stone wall to our right, the omnipotent horizon a head lift away, blotted by a thicketed oasis of hawthorns.

“I heard a rumour,” she leaks like upturned ink.

“Ah, yes?”

“Tommy Price absconded. He’s breached the terms of his license, so they’ll recall him to prison. His brother posted a status update on Facebook, asking if anyone had seen him.”

“He’ll turn up.”

She stops, a sour glare puckering the back of my head. “Is that it?!”

I traipse on towards the copse, prickled fear at my throat, my knee-high boots flapping, the pendulum shovel prodding east to west.

I see the duck too late, perched on a bright green patch of algae.

I fall forward into the stagnant lake, flailing to stay upright, the filthy water seeping into my welly tops.

I splosh in a semi-circle to face Wendy. She’s bent double, her face split in that rare way, her dirty laugh, punctuated by a gravel cough, bouncing off the looming hills. I shoot the grin – pure cringe – arms outstretched for my audience of one. I have become bozo, lightener of worlds.

“Have a heart, darling.”

She picks up a severed branch, offering me the lifeline. “If you pull me in, it’s divorce, buster!”

*****

The day six version of him was an ugly puddle of a man – his shattered knees spreading, his severed nubs flexing, his bagged kitten remonstrations now guttural and sullen. The sting to him had returned, his scheming soul looking to grab, his sawdust compassion dried to a sneering paste.

“Fuck you!”

“I appreciate your honesty, Tommy. I feel now is the right time to reciprocate. I’ve enjoyed searching for Florence. Obviously, not at first, but as time has gone on, certainly, it has helped us. And we’ve been to some fabulous places. This country is beautiful, some of the greenest places I’ve ever seen, like, Jesus wept. It’s true what they say about communing with nature, it’s centring.”

I scooched nearer, the congealed gore clinging to my gym shorts. I flipped the hammer, its dual prongs curling into my palm where I test its heft, my agency, resting the bludgeoning fangs on the contour of his intact socket.

“I don’t enjoy this. I don’t enjoy… the violence. I think it’s harmful to me, actually. In all likelihood, catastrophically harmful. And when you tell me where she is - and you will tell me, even though I won’t let you go and I never intended to - that will bring its own unpleasantness, and I will have to absorb that harm. I will have to keep secrets. So, unless we can coordinate, I am, with regret, going to blind you completely, Tommy. Irreparably. That means with no way back. Fair enough?”

*****

I stretch out my wet legs on the chequered blanket, my woollen toes wriggling against the numbness, watching Wendy slather carrot sticks with plain hummus while squelching a cherry tomato between her teeth, shrugging at me in ephemeral joy - so like Flo’.

I pick at the haloumi in its tin foil swaddling, my jaw working at the squeaky rubber texture, nipping at the lukewarm red gloop in my twin set enamel camping mug that declares ‘I’D RATHER BE AMONGST THE TREES’ in a fuzzy olive font.

“I don’t get halloumi,” Wendy opines to the slate grey sky.

“Oh my God, I was just thinking the same thing! It’s bloody…”

“…tasteless, isn’t it?”

“It’s like when everything suddenly became ‘pulled’. Pulled pork, pulled lamb. Super trendy but...”

“...samey.”

“Yes, and salted caramel bits and bobs.”

“Vile.”

“And yet, you are such an easy target for that, with your peri peri nonsense and jalapeno what-have-yous.”

Her eyes blazed. The association. The picked scab. “I followed you.”

“Oh?”

“Mmm. Last Thursday.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“Sharon took me.”

I snort through a mouthful of masticated falafel.

“Is something funny?”

“Sorry. Just imagining my pursuers – two knee replacements and a pre-diabetic. Starsky and Hutch, you ain’t!”

“Yes, well, she is a bit ponderous. We lost you at the roundabout. You weren’t going to the badminton club.”

“I was probably -- ”

Wendy screws her nose, flicking a carrot stick at me. Hummus splatters my chin, sliding onto my best cagoule. I freeze in disgust.

“Tell me where you go!”

My tongue creeps gecko-like from the corner of my mouth, mopping up the dollop. Wendy laughs, shoving me sideways off our picnic blanket raft, onto the mossy expanse.

“The floor is lava,” she spits.

“Hey, watch my bad back!”

She rights me by the elbow, kneeling behind and kneading my knotted neck. “Is it a woman?”

“No, Wendy, no. Never. I just… occasionally... I need time for myself.”

“If... if you... I will haunt you forever, Phil.”

“Not if I haunt you first, darling.”

*****

I found her on day seven. She was where he said – not far from Briar Wood, up a steep bank, by a dead log, in the roots of a stuck stump, in an oil drum, more dusted than buried.

There wasn’t much left, just razor cheekbones. The hornet tie. The birthmark gone. The shameful brace forever in her blazer pocket. ‘Skeletal remains,’ the news reports would detail, the accusation hanging. That’s all she is, now! Who was seeking? .

I buried her deeper. Said my sorrys.

It became our place, a place for peeled slivers of powdered starch - Texas barbecue flavour - and hunks of sugared sponge, improvising slices with my loyalty cards. I planted and replanted the flag, three times a week, nervous to speak, merely reclaiming her.

When I did talk, it was all anger – that greedy, rueful yearning. How I was right. How she was already pretty.

Then I talked about Mum. The places we’d been, looking. How she was there too, an endless destination. How I knew she’d understand.

*****

We arrive late and hungry, refugees chased by a pelting downpour. The closing restaurant fixed us cold beef salads for the room, and sneaked us a bottle of Prosecco, and we found ourselves giddy with stolen joy, making love for the first time that year.

In the morning, we brave the bracing balcony, wrapped in complimentary cotton dressing gowns and disposable slippers, individually packaged like the breakfast tea, which we dilute with tiny plastic pots of semi-skimmed milk. We face the sheer wall of an unpointed brick building opposite, but smell the salt, and hear the caw of brazen gulls bottom feeding from the unguarded hands of tide watchers consumed by themselves and their place in things.

“Do we have a plan for Tommy Price,” she asks to ask.

“No darling,” I lie, knowing what she really means. “There’s no plan anymore.”

Her eyes crinkle at some unseen horizon, her shoulders unknitting, her fingers tracing the healing grazes on my knuckles with parental pride.

“This plan we don’t have, do you want me to be part of it?”

“No, darling,” I reassure through the blackout respite of tender eyelids. “One of us needs to keep looking.”

BIO: an Johnson is an emerging writer from North East England. His words appear in Trash Cat Lit, Product, Apricot Press, Underbelly, Pistol Jim, Literary Garage and Free Flash Fiction. He is a 2026 ‘Best of the Net’ nominee.