Transgressions

by Sarah Dunant

  She stared down at his face. His skin was going gray; you could actually watch it happen, see the blood and the life draining away. They had been through so much together. Why be embarrassed by difficult questions now? She put her lips next to his ear. “Can you hear me?” she whispered.

  He made a small noise. How familiar they are to me, she thought, all your little grunts and moans.

  “It was only me, wasn’t it? That’s what you meant about choosing me. You never did anything to anybody else, did you? It was always only me.”

  A frown flickered over his face, but if he had anything to say, the time for saying it had already passed. Even the blood was ebbing slowly now, the trickle from his mouth already drying on her fingers, crusting on his chin. Instead there was only the pressure of her arms around him and the long wait for the help that was never going to arrive in time. As it hadn’t in his life, so it wouldn’t in his death.

  At some point—she would never know when—the world began again and she found herself back within it. From the commotion going on behind her, she understood that the French windows were being forced open. Then came the sound of someone in the room.

  “We need help here,” she said loudly, her back to the figure, and as she did so she realized she was crying. “We need an ambulance.”

  “It’s on its way, Elizabeth,” the voice replied gently, but it didn’t come any nearer, didn’t try to interfere. Clever Catherine: a woman who knew how to get a number from an unanswered call; a woman who would climb walls when she couldn’t get in through front doors. But most of all a woman who recognized a spiritual need as well as a physical one.

  She looked down at him, but he didn’t seem aware of her any longer. There was nothing else she could give him. It was finished between them. When the end came it was scarcely noticeable. No great Victorian death rattle, not even a last wild sigh, just a stopping, a ceasing, a breath that didn’t come after the last one. An absence almost, and a sense of release.

  One of his arms had fallen at a strange angle to his body. She picked it up carefully and laid it on his chest. It was then, for the first time, that she noticed the wristwatch. Surprising that she hadn’t recognized it before. So easily done—pick it up from a bedside table and slip it onto your own wrist. Of course he would have known where it had been. Two lovers. One watch. Had it given him a sense of ownership or just a sense of time? He didn’t need it now. She slipped it over his hand and onto her own.

  Behind her she became aware of Catherine’s voice, low and rhythmic, speaking intently, with a sense of purpose. But not to her. Given the circumstances of this particular leaving someone would need to have a word with God. And who better to do the interceding?

  epilogue

  Sometime after dark it started snowing again, tentatively this time, more like an afterthought, watery little flakes caught in flurries of wind. She stood by the glass and watched them fall.

  The room was cold, the boarded-up window adequate for security but not for drafts. If she was going to stay up longer she’d need to put on the central heating again. She ought to sleep now, but she wasn’t ready to leave the room. It wasn’t that she was scared—from the moment she had held him in her arms all the fear had somehow been washed out of her—more that she needed to get used to being on her own again. After twelve hours of policemen, doctors, and forensic gatherers crawling like lice over the kitchen, their absence was almost as disconcerting as their presence.

  The first thing she did was to take a scrubbing brush to the floor. In the movies the stain always remains, the blood soaking through the cracks into the very fabric of the world, black instead of red. But here, in her kitchen, she found that it washed away too easily. She looked around her. Clean the surfaces, put the hinge back on the oven, take off the boards and reglaze the windows and there would be nothing left. Nothing, that is, but her memory. Somehow it didn’t seem enough. She left a corner of the stain untouched. Maybe given time it would seep its way into the wood. A wound in the floor. It was the most and the least she could offer him.

  Police files would supply the rest of his immortality, though he would always be a footnote rather than a headline. Mad stalker as opposed to serial killer. That was what the army of fluid and fiber collectors were there to verify; there was only one scene to his crime, and only one victim.

  They hadn’t needed much convincing.

  From what they had told her it sounded almost routine. Like many before him, the real Holloway Hammer had turned out to be an otherwise respectable fellow: a freelance car mechanic, married, with two kids, living in Hendon and working on a breakdown contract for the Automobile Association in the Islington-Holloway area. The kind of job that took him all places at all hours. Especially in the winter. But on St. Johns Way at four that Christmas morning his luck had run out when a woman across the road had spotted a suspicious-looking man coming out of a basement apartment and walking to the end of the road to where an AA truck was parked. Sometime, somewhere, even the cleverest of them get careless.

  He’d been playing with his kids when they got to him, setting up a Christmas model garage for his youngest boy, his wife in the kitchen peeling the Brussels sprouts for lunch. Just a regular sort of guy. Hard to imagine his family visiting him in prison.

  She had listened quietly while Veronica related it—the two of them sitting together in the living room as they had the night before. When she got to the capture the policewoman had barely been able to conceal her excitement. Maybe this was a first time for her, too.

  As for the others, they had been kindness itself. The police doctor they brought in had offered painkillers and sedatives. She took the first and refused the second; even so, her throat was too swollen to do much talking. They didn’t seem to mind. Most of what they needed to know was there for them to see. She added only what was necessary. The rest she kept private, between him and her. Like the end of any relationship, it was not for public consumption.

  Later, Catherine Baker had called to offer her a bed for the night. But there would be time enough for the two of them to talk if the guilt didn’t wash away with the bloodstains, and for this of all nights she needed to be alone.

  She went upstairs and ran herself a bath. She stripped off her trousers (her other clothes—the blood-soaked skirt and the top—were long gone, preserved in plastic and carefully labeled for forensic labs), and as she did so something fell out of her pocket. The wristwatch from his hand. She had slipped it in there during the interrogation and then forgotten all about it. Strictly speaking it was evidence now. But not unless she told them. She picked it up and let it lie in the palm of her hand. To whom did it belong now? Caught between the two men, maybe it would be okay to keep it herself. Or maybe not.

  She looked at the time: 11:10 P.M. Christmas Day. A lot of dope and videos would have gone down by now. In another incarnation she might have felt like phoning him. But not now.

  She laid the watch on the edge of the bathtub, near to her head, and soaked in the hot foam, eyes closed, listening as it ticked away the seconds till midnight.

  Afterward she put on her robe and returned to the kitchen.

  She stood in the doorway and took it all in: the smashed window, the scrubbed floor, the leftovers of a violent history. What did she feel? Sorrow? Pity? An echo of fear? The words of the Morrison song came back to her. “So quiet in here, so peaceful.”

  The snow had stopped now and the garden was dark. She moved over to the counter. She turned on the stereo, her fingers picking up the dust of fingerprint powder. She blew them clean, then pushed the eject button. The CD compartment slid open, but the disc was gone. Police business, no doubt. It seemed almost fitting, the whole thing ending as it had begun. Enlightenment. She had another copy of it somewhere, but it was too early to be that brave. She would play it again though. She knew that now. Because although she didn’t quite understand why, it was clear that in some way the healing had begun. She turned the phrase over in her mind. It found i
ts own cadence. “And the Healing Has Begun”: track eight from the album Into the Music, blue cover, 1979. Van the Man in love and in recovery.

  She ran her fingers along the spines until she found it, then slipped it into the machine, cuing it into the track and watching the seconds tick by as it played. . . .

  We’re gonna make music underneath the stars

  We’re gonna play to the violin and the two guitars

  We’re gonna sit there and play for hours and hours when the healing has begun . . .

  Like all great albums this one renewed itself with each era. She had once made love to this song with a man who had turned out to be less important than she had at first thought. But the track itself had grown and grown inside her, until she knew every flow and note of it—the way the piano came in like shafts of sunshine, the way the arrangement got looser and looser, like two bodies who couldn’t get enough of each other, the sense of their intoxication growing through each long musical phrase.

  Maybe that was the point about love. You never knew where you were going to find it. Which one was going to last or which one fade away. That was why you had to keep on trying. Until then, all you could do was to keep on listening.

  She turned the music up and looked out over the back gardens. Christmas night and the world was a safer place than it had been twenty-four hours before. Safer and emptier. She found herself looking for the one light that she knew would not be on. How much was she going to miss him? Or the him in her. It wasn’t a question she could answer yet. Maybe she never would.

  I want you to put on your pretty summer dress.

  You can wear your Easter bonnet and all the rest

  And I wanna make love to you yes, yes, yes and when the healing has begun.

  Roll on the spring, when she could open the windows and let the world in again.

  Go to bed, Lizzie, she thought. You have a book to finish and in the real world the night is for sleeping.

  As the track finished she turned and went upstairs to bed, leaving the CD playing and the door to the rest of the house unlocked behind her.

  acknowledgments

  This book, like my life, is made much richer by the music in it. A special thanks to Van Morrison and Exile Publishing Ltd./Polygram Music Ltd., who gave permission for me to use lyrics from “So Quiet in Here” and “And the Healing Has Begun.”

  “The Mind of Love,” words and music by k.d. lang and Ben Mink, copyright © 1992, Bumstead Productions (U.S.) Incorporated/Polygram International Publishing Incorportated/Zavion Enterprises Incorporated/Rondor Music International Incorporated, USA. Polygram Music Publishing Ltd., 47 British Grove, London W4/Rondor Music (London) Ltd., 10a Parson’s Green, London SW6. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured.

  “Ain’t Got No Money,” words and music by Frankie Miller, copyright © 1976, Chrysalis Music Limited, The Chrysalis Building, Bramley Road, London W10. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured.

  “Drop Baby Drop,” words and music by Eddy Grant by permission of International Music Publications Ltd.

  SARAH DUNANT has written eight novels and edited two books of essays. She has worked widely in print, television, and radio. Now a full-time writer, she is adapting her novels Transgressions and Mapping the Edge for the screen. Dunant has two daughters and lives in London and Florence.

  ALSO BY SARAH DUNANT

  The Birth of Venus

  Mapping the Edge

  Under My Skin

  Fatlands

  Birth Marks

  Snow Storms in a Hot Climate

  Praise for Transgressions

  “Scary and deviously absorbing” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A taut thriller that will strike fear into every woman who lives on her own.” —Cosmopolitan

  “Through [Dunant’s] deliberations over this text and her own slow-building vulnerability she explores the nature of brutality—and, in particular, how women who experience the worst forms of violence from men can manage to escape the tag of victim and take control. The author draws you into a stark and disturbing world where she scrutinizes her own craft and motives while keeping you on tenterhooks right until the final spine-chilling denouement.” —Good Housekeeping

  “Don’t read Sarah Dunant’s fifth novel at night if you live on your own.” —The Daily Telegraph

  “Original and disturbing.” —The Sunday Telegraph

  “Brave and interesting . . . [Dunant’s] narrative pulses with emotional truth and heart.” —The Mail on Sunday

  “Dunant’s unflashy, well-modulated prose brings the story on swiftly and engrossingly.” —The Observer (London)

  “An unsettling, often chilling portrait.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “An intelligent psychological thriller.” —New Weekly

  “Dunant’s unsettling novel is compelling to the end.” —Sunday Express

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2005 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1998 by Sarah Dunant

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by BCA in 1997 and in the United States by HarperCollins in 1998. This edition published by arrangement with the author.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dunant, Sarah.

  Transgressions: a novel / Sarah Dunant.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 1-58836-482-8

  1. Women translators—Fiction. 2. Stalking victims—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. 4. Single women—Fiction. 5. Stalkers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6054.U45756T7 2005

  823′.914—dc22 2005042757

  www.atrandom.com

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