Transgressions

by Sarah Dunant

  She used the palm of her hand to wipe it off the screen, leaving a dirty smear but uncovering what was written below. It was an extract from the book, an early test draft, English rather than Czech, with the letters big—blown up to three or four times their normal size. It read:

  The door opened and the man walked in. Hurriedly, Mirka got up from the makeshift bed and turned to face him. “I want to—“

  “Just shut the fuck up,” he interrupted, in coarse dialect. “No one gives a fuck what you want, d’you understand?”

  She stopped, but still she held his gaze. The man stood watching her for a moment, then his face relaxed, and he grinned. “So, New York lady, what do you think we should do to that lovely body of yours, eh?”

  And he moved toward her.

  For a while she could do nothing. The sense of violation, the sheer magnitude of the intrusion, was so great that she couldn’t even think straight. She sat heavily on the computer chair staring at the screen and at the keyboard, where droplets of ketchup had sunk in between the letters, already dried and flaky. Like old blood. The viciousness behind the intention shook her into action. She reached for the phone and dialed a number. A man answered.

  “Hello. Is Catherine Baker there?”

  “No. I’m sorry. She’s away at a conference in Southampton.” A man’s voice, nice, husbandy. “She won’t be back until Friday. Can I take a message?”

  She didn’t bother to reply and hung up the phone.

  “Did you know that, too?” she said out loud to the room around her. No one answered. She dialed another number. Three digits. But before the voice could reply, “Emergency, which service do you require?” she pressed the disconnecting button, suddenly as scared of their scorn and disbelief as she was of the echo of violence around her.

  And then, because there was nothing else that she could do, she started to think.

  If Catherine Baker’s analysis was correct, and this latest act of vandalism was one more reflection of a psychic disturbance in her, then the only conclusion she could come to was that she was, in some way, clinically insane. There could surely be no other explanation for the chasm between her newly felt sense of calm and the room’s anarchistic violence. Yet how could anyone be that mad and not know it?

  But if that was not the explanation, then there was only one other. That sometime between six P.M. last night, when she had gone out to meet Malcolm, and an hour ago, when she had woken up for the second time, somebody rather than something had been in her house. Like all the other times, presumably, they had got in somehow through the French windows, then this time, having found the kitchen door open, they had climbed the stairs up to the attic and created havoc with a ketchup bottle.

  A ketchup bottle? Theirs or hers? Suddenly such an absurd question seemed desperately important. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and wrenched open the fridge. Sure enough, the place in the door where the ketchup customarily sat alongside the lemon juice was now empty. She checked the bin for an empty bottle, but there was nothing there.

  She was still standing staring into the garbage as if it might deliver an answer when Millie smashed her way through the cat flap and came yowling across the floor, all semblance of dignity lost in flight. The flap banged again, this time admitting the black tom in wild pursuit. She picked up the first thing she could find, a fork on the sideboard, and flung it at him. It missed, but he swerved and turned, ears back, hissing, a raw violence in his fury, before making a run for it, dodg-ing past her, back out through the flap and across the garden and over the wall. She watched him go, her heart pounding against the side of her rib cage.

  It’s just a cat. It’s just a cat, she said to herself. But the thought of its malevolence persisted. Ever since it had arrived in the garden both she and Millie had been living under a regime of terror. She stared down at the cat flap. Maybe she should block it up. Keep out the outside world.

  Block it up. . . . Keep out the outside world. . . . The two thoughts moved around in her brain. The outside world—the cat flap.

  She moved over to the French windows and stared down at the lock above the handle. Then she looked at the cat flap. It was swinging slightly, still settling on its moorings. The distance between the two was about four or five feet. She put her hand on the catch of the lock and as she did her fingers encountered a kind of roughness at the base of the catch, disturbing its smooth metal surface.

  She played with it further, then squatted down to examine it more carefully. Yes, the steel underneath was definitely scored as if something had been scraping persistently at it. Once again she looked from it to the cat flap. And this time something slowly began to make sense in her brain. She moved around the kitchen, intent suddenly, searching through the drawers. She found a skewer—the kind used for barbecues, when she and Tom had been sociable enough to have them. She took it over to the door and slid the tip of it into the gap between the top of the handle and the catch of the lock. Then she wiggled it up and down until the leverage of the skewer had enough force and it pushed the catch upward. She turned the handle of the door. It opened, the lock released.

  Her heart beating faster she went outside, closing the door behind her. She squatted down by the cat flap and, holding the skewer at arm’s length, pushed her arm through, until she could bend it at the elbow. With her forearm extended and the skewer at the end of it she could now reach almost to the handle of the door. Almost, but not quite.

  She withdrew her hand and went inside, locking the door behind her. In the living room she found a poker, long and thick, tapering off at the end to a thinner tip of metal. She went back and repeated the exercise. This time the poker reached to the catch. It was hard to keep her hand steady enough, but she managed it. The tip of the poker slipped in and under the catch. Of course the door was already open. She could have tried locking it that way, but if she succeeded then she might never get back in again. Someone else could have done it though. Because somebody already had. She now knew that with absolute certainty, knew that somebody had crouched where she was crouching now and teased and prodded the lock until it released itself and let them into her house.

  And then, of course, everything was suddenly explained. How they had got in only to find themselves confined to the kitchen because the door kept them out of the rest of the house, but how, with a little imagination, there had been enough mischief to be done there—from the casual appropriation of a couple of CDs to more sinister play with music, moving on to the repositioning of furniture and the laying of the table. Each act a little bigger, taking a little longer, exhibiting a greater confidence in the intrusion, almost some kind of game plan.

  Until this last one, when fate had left the kitchen door open and given them the whole house to play in.

  Them? But who? And where from?

  The first two questions she still couldn’t answer. But the last one she at least had some idea of. She looked out across the garden. She must have stood out here a hundred times since Tom left, on each occasion feeling utterly safe, the anonymity of all those back windows staring down at her. She remembered the mornings in the summer when she had breakfasted out here, comforted by the nearness of the world yet protected by her sense of privacy within it. And all the time somebody, somewhere, had been watching her.

  Night was coming in fast. She walked to the end of the garden and looked around at the semicircle of houses that backed onto the end of hers. Her garden wall was high, maybe as tall as she was, but it was hardly impenetrable. Any one of the connecting gardens could have led into it, and in turn have connected back onto others. She counted the windows around her. There were dozens of them.

  She turned and looked back at her house. The kitchen was lit up, the counters, even the table, clearly visible. She had no blinds, no curtains. She had never felt the need for them. Above the kitchen was a small bathroom window and then, to the right, her bedroom. It was just a dark shadow now, but with the light on, or even the light from the hall, the area around
the window itself would also be seen clearly. She sometimes stood there, too. And last night it hadn’t just been her. Last night she had been there with a man’s arms around her, the two of them silhouetted in the frame in that parody of an act of love, which now, it seemed, had led directly to an act of violence.

  It was the logic of that connection that scared her more than anything else. She walked quickly back into the house and locked the door behind her. Then she went into the cellar and found a large ball of garden twine. She used it to secure the lock to the handle, winding it around and around and around, until there was no room for manipulation, no sliver of space where a metal edge could get in and release the lock. Then she went out of the kitchen and locked the door, pushing a broom up against the handle and wedging it against the wall, so that even if the lock broke, the door would not open. From the hall she called the locksmith, then went upstairs to clean the study.

  He arrived before she’d finished. When the doorbell rang she had gathered up the paper, relocating each sheet in its own order and language, scrubbed most of the ketchup stains from the walls, and was at work on the computer, painstakingly scraping globules of gunk from in between the keys.

  This time she asked to see some kind of identification before she opened the door. He slid a card through the space left by the chain. It wasn’t the same man; this one was younger, with a broken nose and a bony face. She spent a long time checking his credentials.

  “I asked for the man I had before,” she said, as she took the chain off the lock.

  “He’s out on another job,” he replied, with an equal lack of charm. “This is my night off. They had to call me in special.”

  “I don’t care. It was the other man I wanted.”

  He shrugged. “Look, if you want to complain call the governor. You’ll still have to pay the call-out charge. If you want it done tonight it’s me or no one.”

  She scowled and showed him down to the kitchen. It took her a while to unwedge the broom. He glanced at her strangely. “You had a burglar?” he asked, sounding supremely uninterested.

  “You could call him that.”

  At the French windows he screwed his nose up at the twine. “Is the lock broke?”

  “No. It’s extra protection. They’re coming in through the cat flap, pushing something in and manipulating the lock.”

  He looked at her as if she were mad. She did nothing to reassure him. “So, what d’you want me to do? Change the lock? Add another?”

  “Both. And stick in some bolts at the top and bottom.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got nothing but time and it’s your money.”

  As she sat and watched him the darkness thickened outside. He didn’t like her sitting there. It made him nervous. Well, it’s nice to have someone who’s more scared than I am, she thought, as she watched him sniffing, running a quick hand under his nose, apparently unembarrassed by his lack of a tissue.

  If it was him, what would I do? she thought. If it was him in here now? I’d have to hit him with something. A plate, a saucepan. The kitchen knives were sitting in front of her in their block. Would I do that? she thought. Could I? Could I really pick up one of those and use it?

  He glanced up and caught her eyes on the knife block. He gave her an edgy little smile. “You know, if you’re really worried about burglars, you could always call the police,” he muttered, as if it were something they had already been talking about.

  “The police?” she said rather dreamily. “Yes. They’re such a help, aren’t they?”

  He went back to the work even faster. An hour later, the door was transformed into something out of a cartoon, locks and bolts everywhere. He ran her through them all. Then she got out the poker and tested the ones at the top and bottom. They were a long way away from the cat flap.

  He was already gathering his tools and heading for the exit. He made out the bill with the door open, was even about to pocket it before she’d given him her credit card.

  “You better write down the number,” she said. “For all you know I could be a fraud.”

  He glanced up at her. Not you, lady, she could hear him thinking, you’re too crazy for that. She liked the fact that he was scared of her. As he handed back her card she gave him a big, wild grin. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  With the front door locked up she now went back to the kitchen and once again tested all the locks. She pulled the bottle of brandy from the cupboard and poured herself a hefty slug. Then she took the portable phone from its hook and stationed it next to her at the table. She would have liked to listen to some music, felt the sense of someone else’s company around her, but the stereo could be heard in the garden and she didn’t want to put him off. When she felt ready she closed the kitchen door, came back to her seat, and switched off the light.

  The dark jumped in around her. She waited, breathing deeply and evenly. Eventually black became gloom and she began to make out the shapes: the bread bin, the shelves, the frame of the French windows, and the intense live blackness beyond. She moved her chair back against the wall. From outside looking in you would not be able to make her out at all. After a while her pulse returned to its normal rate.

  She had been sitting there for maybe half an hour when the phone rang. It cut through the silence like a knife flash out of darkness. She grabbed so fast that she missed and it fell to the floor where she had to scramble to find it, then peer and grope in the dark to get the right button.

  “Hello,” said a man’s voice when she finally connected. “I thought you were out.”

  “Who is this?” she asked harshly.

  “It’s me, Malcolm? Remember? From last—”

  “Malcolm. God. Malcolm.”

  “Yeah. How are you?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “You . . . er . . . sound strange. What are you doing?”

  Sitting in the dark waiting for a man, she thought. “Nothing. Just . . . just hanging out. How about you?”

  “Oh, this and that. Listen . . . I, er . . . I’m sorry, but I left my watch there.”

  “What?”

  “My watch. I must have left it in your bedroom. I think on the bedside table.”

  “Your watch?”

  No doubt an analyst would have something to say about that particular memory lapse. But, then, that’s what they’re paid for. Given the embarrassed tone of his voice it seemed clear to her that it was just a watch. “Yes.”

  “Oh. So what d’you want me to do. Do you want me to mail it to you?”

  “Yeah. Or . . . or I could drop ’round and pick it up.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know . . . I mean, I could come now. I’ve just finished at the office and—”

  “No,” she said, louder than she intended. “No, not now. Not tonight. I’m . . . I’m busy.”

  “I see. Well, then maybe you could stick it in the mail.”

  She took down the address. As she wrote it she wondered if she was misjudging the conversation, if he was really saying something else. What would she think if he was? Hard to know. Things had moved so far since last night. She didn’t feel like the same person at all. “I’ll make sure I do it tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.” Pause. “Are you all right?”

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances,” she said, laughing, before she had had time to think about it. He laughed back, but a little uncomfortably. This time the pause was a silence. “Sorry,” she added abruptly. “I’m . . . I’m a bit tired.”

  “Yeah, me, too. Okay, well . . . listen, I’ll see you around, then.”

  “Yes. See you around.”

  The line clicked and she put the phone back on the table. She reran the conversation in her head. He would think she was weird. Add him to the list. Maybe she should call him back, tell him her problem, and ask him to come over and save her. Slay the dragon and win the maiden. Isn’t that how it used to work? Whatever happened to chivalry? Did they lose the habit, or did we giv
e it up with our virginity? Poor Malcolm, she thought, he’d probably be as scared of this as I am.

  She looked at her watch in the gloom. Nine-thirty. She sat and waited some more. It was still too early. But she had all night and he would come. She was sure of it. Time passed. She thought of Jake sitting by the phone, his nerves eaten by fear, waiting. Waiting. His call would be different from hers. They wouldn’t even want money. Just to flay him alive a little with the sound of her voice. And make sure the shipment that was on its way got a clean bill of health. He had already called off the tail on the men fingered by the antiques dealer. He knew he was defeated the minute the car had pulled away, knew he’d give them anything they wanted. Swallow the fury and hold it later for revenge. “When do I get her back?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll see her tomorrow morning.”

  The box with its bloody little contents wrapped in tissue was on his doorstep at six a.m. The blood had dried fast to the paper; he had to pull it off. It was stubby and cold to the touch. It looked absurd more than horrific, the flesh waxy and stiff, almost like some kind of joke marzipan fruit. Why was it always fingers? Fingers or ears. Maybe they were the only amputations you could do without a doctor present. After all, you wouldn’t want them to die from loss of blood.

  Was that her talking or the book? She tossed her head to get rid of the thought, and, as she did so, across the darkened kitchen the cat flap snapped open. She turned her head in time to see a dark shape moving its way across the floor. Not so much intruding as needing a way to the food pellets. She let out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.