by Sarah Dunant
But for all of the sarcasm she knew she was scared. And that was why she didn’t want to go back to the house.
The supermarket had more people in it than she had seen for months. She had, she now realized, been keeping away from crowds, shopping in smaller places close to home, rushed little expeditions at the end of the day for only the most vital of supplies. The choice seemed overwhelming. She went through the aisles plucking out anything that caught her fancy: ingredients for exotic meals she’d never cook, an expensive bottle of brandy, useless luxuries like cans of grossly scented air freshener, the consumers’ way of driving out unwanted household presences. As she unpacked them at the register she almost told the cashier, “These? Oh, these are my ghostbusters. Would you recommend meadow fresh or something a little more evergreen?” How absolutely absurd, she thought, for life to be so normal and so strange.
She bought so much she had to get a taxi home. She waited till she had unloaded the bags and got the door open before paying, just in case the spirits had multiplied and were waiting behind the front door to spook her. But there was nothing there except the mail and a special-offer coupon from the local Indian take-out.
In the kitchen the landscape had altered slightly. The saucepans were as she had left them, but the cat pellets were gone. Her heart started an instant acceleration till she spotted Millie curled on a chair looking like she’d died and gone to cat heaven. She tipped up the chair and the cat fell off, yowling in overfed protest.
“You’re not supposed to eat the evidence,” she muttered as she kicked her out of the room.
Outside, a watery sun was throwing pale shadows across the lawn and the few remaining geraniums were curling under the onslaught of the cold. She sighed. Her kitchen. Her garden. She remembered back to the summer, when the place had been vibrating with her sense of release. She saw herself shimmying across the floor, the stereo blasting, a new contract on her desk and a whole life stretched out in front of her. Where had that extraordinary optimism gone? Shriveled up by a frost of paranoia and fear. Even the cappuccino machine and her bright new mugs no longer seemed so inviting. How quickly it can all fall apart.
On the wall bracket the phone rang. She had to stop herself jumping at the sound of it. She listened while the answering machine took the call.
“Hi, Eliza. It’s Charles. Are you there? I was wondering how it was going with you and the words. Can I tempt you away from the keyboard for a little chat?”
He gave a chuckle and waited. Charles, at his most enthusiastic and puppylike. She couldn’t possibly talk to him now. It wouldn’t do to let him know that his employee was flirting with madness.
“Obviously not. Anyway, listen, I’ve got more news on the movie deal. It’s all-systems-go apparently. Which, of course, is absolutely brilliant for us because it means not only all that divine free publicity but a photo on the paperback cover. B.P. eating a bratwurst or whatever you call them. Or should we go for something darker? Bit more grisly—Irène disemboweled with Brad scooping her innards back in. Yum-yum. Course it also means we have to get our skates on. Limited hardcover spring release with mass paperback tied to the film release. Which, my dearest, I’m sure you’re more than capable of, fast little wordsmith that you are. You wouldn’t have a fit if I pulled the delivery date forward by six weeks or so, would you? Eh? So easy to ask favors from a machine, isn’t it? They never answer back. No doubt I’ll get to talk to the real person soon enough. Anyway, call and let me know what you think. And keep those bloody words flowing. Love and thoughts.”
“To you, too, Charles,” she said as she held her finger down on the button to erase the message. “Don’t hold your breath.”
In homage to the spirit of happier times she let the cappuccino machine do its work. As the water snarled its way into steam she thought of all the records she could play to drown it out, but somehow even the music had lost its attraction. The reverend’s visit—in her mind she couldn’t bring herself to call her Catherine—was still hours away. She could either sit and watch the clock go around to check that someone wasn’t moving the hands or she could get on with work.
Work. If Charles was serious about pulling the deadline forward it didn’t leave her much time to have a nervous breakdown about the current spiritual activity in her house. She needed to get Jake and Mirka into crisis and violence, then out of it again. The schedule wasn’t impossible, only a little more intense than she would have preferred. Especially now. Biderman and his tortured soul. Not to mention the tortured bodies. Cliché. Exploitative fiction. Just a way of earning a living. Maybe the problem was that she’d been close to it for so long it was beginning to feel like real life. Could it be that her isolation had given it too much prominence, had even encouraged his nightmares to leak into hers?
Stupid. Once she thought about it, it seemed so simple. A matter of attitude. If that was the problem she should simply stop trying so hard, start treating it like work, rather than feelings. More matter, less art. No one was going to read it that carefully anyway.
She looked at her watch: 1:45. She locked the kitchen door and made her way up. Inside the privacy of the word processor Jake was about to be frightened. But not me, she thought, as she climbed the stairs. Not me.
He left the black plastic bag in the hands of the forensics boys and made his way back to the office, picking up breakfast en route. But when it came to it he couldn’t face the food. Instead he went for the liquid. The caffeine punched him in the gut. Jesus, in America this concentration of any drug would be illegal. Here they drank it like water. Still, he needed to wake up. He poked his fingers hard into his eye sockets. Even after a shower her rotting was still all over him, resting in the pores of his skin, sliding up into his nostrils, the smell more animal than human now. At least dead flesh felt no pain. The best you could hope for her was that she had died halfway through. He remembered the sweet-sour perfume of her body alive, standing close to him in the café. It doesn’t take much to turn a person into manure. Nobody deserved that. . . .
Christ, even with the coffee he was tired. Not so much to do with fighting sleep as fighting fear. Fear. That was something they didn’t teach you about in police academy. Or not enough. They never told you about how much of a disease it was, how it attacked your mind as much as your body, filing down your nerve ends till they screamed. If you let it get the better of you it could drive you half-mad.
The secret was controlling the memory. It was the kind of advice you’d give to a kid. If the book scares you don’t read it. If the memory scares you, man, forget it. Easier said than done. Like wiping out the sight of a broom handle stuck up a vagina. Or worse, the look in a girl’s eyes.
He’d been a cop for only eighteen months, out on the street for less than a year, still wet behind the ears. And other places. It wasn’t even a dangerous job. He was one of a couple of dozen extra men brought in to make house-to-house calls in a sleepy Westchester suburb. Jesus, it was so respectable up there you’d think they’d abolished crime. Still, according to the bosses, the guy they were looking for was maybe somewhere in the area.
The girl had been kidnapped three weeks before, lifted off the street on her way from her job at the office. Just an ordinary worker for an ordinary multinational. Except for the fact that Daddy damn near owned the company. The first couple of ransom notes had come along with a video, the girl half-naked in some kind of cage, eyes like a rabbit in the headlights babbling some script about used bills and drop-off points that he’d written for her. Except when they gave him what he wanted he didn’t come for it. Just sent back another film to add to the police’s pornography library. It was the worst kind of case, the bosses said, one where he was more interested in the girl than the money. What they didn’t say was they’d had a carbon copy of this one ten months before. But, then, nobody likes to admit they’ve got a serial on their hands. Sickos with a habit. The world was full of them, clever bastards.
This time they did have something though. Whe
n they circulated the details of a suspicious-looking van parked behind the office, someone reported a sighting of it turning off a highway three weeks before. It was pure luck really. He could have been going anywhere. To any one of five thousand houses. Or none of them. It was a long shot. But Jake sort of knew the minute he knocked on the door. Funny how some houses just smell of the shit that’s going on inside them.
The guy had been shifty right from the start. He had a good story. He was some kind of writer working on a book. He had a studio all set up in there: bookshelves, word processor, printer, the whole lot. But even though he didn’t put a foot wrong there was something about him that was messed up. Jake could feel it as he stood in the bedroom doorway looking around, could feel the guy’s body behind him, humming with tension. If they’d plugged him into an electrical outlet he would have lit up the whole damn street. But there was nothing to incriminate him. Nothing in any of the rooms. Upstairs or down.
It wasn’t till he got back out on the street again and looked along the roofs that Jake realized he hadn’t checked the attic. There must be one. The guy two doors down had had his converted, and the houses were pretty similar. Yet he couldn’t remember seeing a trapdoor anywhere, though in one bedroom there had been a couple of big wardrobes right up to the ceiling. Heavy motherfuckers, probably. Unless they were empty.
If he’d been more experienced he would have radioed for help. But if he’d been more experienced he would have known to trust his gut. He drove the car into the next street and walked back. When there was no answer he went in through the back.
The guy was already halfway up into the attic when he caught him, the wardrobes pushed back against another wall. He told him to freeze, but when the man turned he had a gun in his hand and the shots missed Jake by inches. His own found a home. He got him in the upper leg, and then, when he still didn’t stop firing, Jake got him in the stomach. The guy fell like a lump of bird shit, straight down, thud, then lay doubled up, groaning and moaning like an animal. Jake kicked the gun away from him and radioed for help. It was then that he heard her.
She was still screaming when he got up to her. She was in a metal cage, half-naked, filthy, shaking, a chain around her ankle connecting her to the bars. There was a dog bowl nearby with scraps in it and a pot a few feet away. The smell of urine was everywhere. But nothing shook him as much as the look in her eye. You couldn’t even call it fear. More like stupor. He even wondered if she had been drugged, except nobody drugged could scream that much. He hadn’t dared touch her. All he could do was stand there, talking, telling her she was okay now, that she was safe, while yelling to them back at base to get a woman out there, and fast.
Later he would hear that she’d had a series of breakdowns, spent the next year in and out of institutions. For a long time after, she became his recurring nightmare, the eyes and the scream. His partner, Ernie, said it was only natural. That even the best cops sometimes discover that the filth doesn’t wash away. Her distress became such an obsession that in the end he even asked permission to visit her, see how she was. Not surprisingly the request was refused. Last he heard, three or four years back, she was still in trouble, running up Daddy’s bills with a score of shrinks who couldn’t even get her to go out of the house on her own.
For him it had got easier. Five months later, Mirka had walked into his life, lovely and unscarred, and the warmth of her body had dispelled his nightmares and kept the cage at bay. She had loved him and he was healed. Simple as that. Except nothing lasts forever. How it got lost he still couldn’t quite remember. Somehow the grind and the dirt of other cases and other pains started to wear away at her optimism and patience. She got scared for him. And then when she couldn’t do anything about that she got scared for herself. He said she was the one who had changed. She said it was him. By the end it didn’t matter. By the end their fights were so loud and vicious it was clear that they both had. But he was the one who got the nightmares back. The day after he moved out, sleeping on Ernie’s sofa bed in the living room, the cage and the screams came back. And kept on coming. He had lost his talisman against fear. For a while that spring, he thought that he, like the girl in the attic, might die of it. But he hadn’t. Instead he’d thrown himself into work. He was still alive.
He drained the coffee cup and picked up the phone to call New York. It was time to exert a little pressure on the bad guys, make them hurt a bit. Half an hour later he got what he needed. Back on their home turf the big boys were going to find somebody putting salt on their tails. After all, multinationals have to keep the profits up in all their markets, not just the expanding ones. And this time he’d make sure they knew where the pressure was coming from.
She had worked fast, letting the word count mean more than the words. She read it back for typos then put it through the spell-checker. Maybe she should print out a copy of it for Reverend Baker as proof that the higher you go the harder it is to find God. Attics. Always the places where the secrets are kept, like the dark bits of the mind. Except the contents of this particular attic would surprise no one, she thought scornfully. Women chained up as dogs; they were a dime a dozen these days. What else should any modern self-respecting psychopath do with a kidnap victim? Sadistic chic. Maybe that was what angered her so much about the scene: its fashionable conformity, its predictability, right down to the abused turning into the mad.
If before she had been afraid of her cynicism, worried that it might somehow undermine the text, now she felt emboldened by it. How much more challenging if the writer had seen fit to give the caged girl a different future: six months of therapy that blew away her fear and turned her into a lawyer or a painter with a husband and children of her own, and a house where she had no problem converting the attic into a well-lit playroom.
The least he could have done was to fight fantasy with fantasy. “Jake later heard that Mary Louise Brown had joined the police force, where she became known as a kind of avenging angel for women in trouble, swooping down on violent men and snapping their bodies between her doglike teeth until they screamed for mercy, then leaving them for dead, taking their young female victims home and tending their wounds, both mental and physical, till they were strong enough to go back out on the streets and break a few balls of their own.”
Maybe she should just stick it in. One paragraph in five hundred pages. They probably wouldn’t even notice. Charles was a notoriously sloppy reader, and with the deadline snapping at his heels he wouldn’t even bother that hard. Just her own small notation: like the Renaissance biblical copyists leaving their individual marks on the page.
Her fingers were hovering over the keyboard when, three flights down, the doorbell rang. The sound brought back the present and the kitchen and the fear that wasn’t in the words. She rose up to greet it.
nine
The reverend was waiting on the step with a pot of what looked like early daffodils in her hand. She was wearing a long flowing coat, rather splendid, and her hair, caught in the wind, was a halo of salt-and-pepper gray. She looked, well, unlike a vicar.
“Hello. Any further developments?” she said as she held out the plant. “Oh, these are for you, by the way. I’m afraid it’s early days, but they always come through in the end.”
“Thanks. Er . . . no. Though while I was out, something ate the cat pellets.”
“You don’t think it could have been the cat?” she said, with such a straight face it took a while for the humor to register.
She led her downstairs. As she unlocked the door, she thought, What if it’s all gone away? What if I did just imagine it all?
But there it was, the table laid and untouched, the pans on the floor with a few errant pellets still scattered in between.
The woman stood in the doorway, then came in slowly, looking around, obviously trying to get a sense of the place. What was she after? Signs of fraud or distress? It was so long since anyone else had been there. When was the last time? Apart from the policeman, it must have been the dinn
er party after she got back from New York, two, two and a half months now. No wonder this spirit had got so cheeky. It must have assumed it had the place to itself.
The reverend walked over to the windows and looked out. “What a lovely garden. You’ve done some work out there.”
“Yes. Would you . . . would you like a cup of tea?”
“Thank you, I would.” She flicked up the handle on the kitchen door. It was locked. “How do you open this?”
“You have to pull up the catch above. It releases the lock.”
“Ah. Yes. I see. Sad, isn’t it?” she said, locking the doors back up again. “The way winter cuts it all off. Makes you feel like a prisoner in your own house.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Is that what I’m supposed to be feeling? she thought. Would a sense of climatic siege have been enough to give birth to this psychic mischief maker?
She got on with making the tea while Catherine squatted down by the saucepans, picking up the odd cat pellet, then moving to the table, running her hands over the crockery, holding up the cornflakes box, apparently reading the back panel for clues. What was she doing? Listening for the call of the wild, the echo of a paranoid soul trying to get out? This isn’t going to work, Elizabeth thought. She can’t help me. I should never have let her come.
“You said you were a translator?” the woman asked, as they sat together at the other end of the table from the breakfast things, cradling mugs of tea in their hands.