Hand of Death

by Margaret Yorke

  Cooley had asked her earlier if she had scratched him, but she’d said she hardly saw his face.

  ‘I’m sorry to make you talk about it again,’ he said. ‘But, in the end, it’s better if you face it – don’t bury it till you’ve got it all out of your system. Who else have you told about it? A girl friend?’

  Valerie shook her head.

  ‘No one,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t. It’s too dreadful.’

  ‘Well, if you could, it might help,’ said Cooley.

  ‘Suppose I’m pregnant?’ Valerie asked. There! It was out!

  ‘Are you? Would you know by now?’

  ‘I’m due,’ said Valerie. ‘Two days ago.’

  ‘Well – you’ll have to go to the doctor, then, won’t you?’ Cooley said. ‘Give it a couple more days – maybe a week – but don’t hang about after that.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think of it – of that—’ Valerie suddenly began to weep. She laid her arms on the table and slumped over them, burying her face. ‘I can’t sleep,’ she wailed. ‘I keep thinking I hear someone in the house.’

  ‘That’ll pass,’ Cooley assured her. But would it? How could a woman get over so dreadful an experience? The man responsible was a monster.

  He’d learned nothing new, and would gain no more by pressing her.

  ‘I’ll pop by again,’ he promised. ‘Just to see how things are going. And if you do remember anything – anything at all, no matter how slight – you let me know. Right? I’ll give you my phone number at home.’ He wrote it for her on a scrap of paper and tucked it under the sugar bowl.

  Valerie pulled a tissue from her sleeve and wiped her face, then blew her nose.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, managing the semblance of a smile. Her face was blotchy, but Cooley still liked it. ‘Will you really come again?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ he said. He’d suggest to the panda patrol boys that they might cruise down Ship Lane from time to time, too; there was nothing like a police car in the area to scare off villains.

  ‘I think you really do believe me now,’ said Valerie.

  Cooley patted her arm.

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  But there was not a shred of proof.

  Nancy had decreed that Ronald should go to Dewton on Wednesday afternoon, and so he obeyed. He knocked on several doors and bought a bracket clock in a mahogany case for fifteen pounds. To get it, he paid five pounds for a chipped china ewer. He spent quite a while talking to the old lady who sold the pieces to him, and learned about her neighbours.

  In a cottage along the road from her, he bought a dower chest and a brass scuttle from a whiskered old man who walked with a stick and peered at him from clouded, cataract eyes.

  Then Ronald telephoned Nancy and told her that the van was giving trouble. It wasn’t firing properly, he said; a garage was fixing it, but he didn’t know how long they’d be, they’d had to send out for a part. She shouldn’t wait dinner; he was afraid he would be late.

  When he reached home, he must be ready with an explanation of why he rang her from a call-box, not the garage, just in case she asked.

  He drove to Fletcham, went past the turning to Priory Road, where Felicity Cartwright lived in Number Seven, and parked in a nearby street. Then he returned to Priory Road on foot, a respectable citizen in his raincoat and tweed hat. He wore his dark scarf wound round his neck; the balaclava helmet, the knife and a small torch were in his pockets, and he had his leather driving gloves on.

  It was not yet five o’clock. Felicity Cartwright should still be in her shop, and her house empty. The tricky part would be finding a way of entering it, and he’d thought of one.

  No lights showed as he walked up the short path to the front door. He’d seen it done on television, where it looked easy. Ronald inserted his credit card into the door and tried to press back the catch.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He stood there, furious. What now? Blood pounded in his ears.

  Most of the door was glass, with a wood surround. He could break the glass and turn the catch, but then his presence would be no surprise, and the neighbours might come running. He stared at the door angrily. He must present a calm rear view in case there was a passer-by to notice anything strange.

  His gaze focused on the letter box. It was a wide, vertical slit, quite near the lock, large enough to admit his hand.

  He reached inside the letterbox, felt about, and found the knob. He could just get his finger and thumb round it.

  In seconds he was standing in the hall, the door closed behind him, heart thudding now in triumph. He had done it!

  He waited for a little while in the dark house, in case he had been seen, but nothing happened. He could return to his plan. He turned on his tiny pencil torch, shielding the bulb.

  Basing his reasoning on Nancy’s habits, he’d worked out what to expect. The first thing Nancy did when she returned home was to go into her bedroom and remove her coat, hanging it in the wardrobe or, if wet, in the bathroom to air off. Then she’d see to her hair and all that. A fortnight ago, when he’d come back here with Felicity Cartwright, she’d hurried in, leaving him on the pavement unloading the van, and when he entered the house had called to him from upstairs. Then she’d come down, not wearing her coat. They were all the same. All he had to do was wait for her in her bedroom.

  In the light of his torch, he examined the back door. It was bolted from inside, and opened on to a small garden. A rotating clothes line was sunk in concrete beside a patch of grass.

  Ronald took off his raincoat and tweed hat. He bundled them up and stowed them under a large bush. Then, with his knife, he cut some lengths of plastic rope from the clothes line and coiled them round. That could be useful.

  Wearing his balaclava helmet, with the scarf round the lower part of his face and his hands in his leather gloves, Ronald went upstairs after bolting the back door once more.

  It was easy to see which was her room. There was a big Victorian brass bed, covered with a white silk spread, in the back bedroom. There were tortoiseshell brushes on the rosewood sofa table she used as a dressing table, and there was a faint flowery scent in the air. A peach-coloured quilted dressing gown hung on the door and there was a pair of slippers beside the bed. They were the same colour as the dressing gown, and very small – dainty, he thought, smiling. He enjoyed noticing it all by the light of his torch before he settled down to wait, in his black sweater, his breathing a little muffled by the scarf over his face. He had the knife, blade exposed, in his hand as he stood behind the half-open door.

  He had to wait a long time. Felicity was busy with her own book-keeping that evening.

  It was a quiet road, but an occasional car went by, and as he heard them Ronald tensed, waiting for further sounds that would mean she had entered the house.

  They came at last, the click of the front door opening and the glow of the light from the hall.

  She didn’t come up at once. He heard her moving about below; doors opened and closed and water ran. That was the kitchen. There was no other plumbing on the ground floor of this tiny house.

  Then he heard her on the stairs. Stifling already behind the scarf and the woollen helmet, he drew in his breath and tightened his hand on the knife handle.

  She went into the bathroom, not bothering to close the door properly, imagining herself alone in the house. Soon he heard the lavatory flush. When she pushed the door open a few moments later she almost took him by surprise, for he knew she would be washing, a nice sort of woman like this. But she was quicker than Nancy at such times.

  The bedroom light snapped on and she moved over the threshold away from him, towards the window, quite unaware of his presence which was concealed from her by the door. He watched, breath held, while she drew the curtains. Then he sprang on her from behind and bore her down on to the bed on her back, himself on top of her. He leaned his left arm on her chest and held the knife, in his gloved right hand, at her throat. Excitement surged through his
body.

  ‘If you scream, you’re dead,’ he hissed, in a snarling tone, the same sort of voice he had used with Valerie, quite unlike his normal one.

  Felicity had uttered a strangled shriek, but terror left her too little breath for real screaming. She thought her heart would burst with fear.

  Ronald flourished the knife.

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ he ordered, in his false voice.

  She was incapable of movement beyond opening her mouth, and Ronald thought despite his threats she was going to scream, but in fact she was gulping for air. He hit her hard across the face with his left hand, and then took a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it across her mouth, laying down the knife while he did it, still straddling her with his body. He dragged her head up from the bed by her hair, tying the handkerchief at the back, hitting her again as she began making croaking noises. The gag forced her mouth open but held her tongue down. She felt as if she must choke, struggling to beat and claw at him with her hands.

  Desperately, Felicity tried to fight him, but his weight lay on top of her, holding her down, and his arms pinioned her. She tore at him again, but he hit her in the face once more, much harder this time. The pain brought tears to her eyes and for a moment she stopped resisting. Ronald picked up the knife and laid it against her throat. She felt the point on her flesh. Breathing was still difficult; her chest rose and fell with the effort. Slowly, Ronald sat back. He hurt her; his weight crushed her.

  He felt an enormous surge of power as her resistance ebbed. She was making little guttural sounds in her throat but this merely goaded him on; they were not unlike the lustful moans of Dorothea Wyatt on that magic night. He caught hold of her wrists and forced them up over her head, holding them there with one hand while he laid down the knife once more and pulled the nylon twine from her own washing line out of his pocket. He wound it tightly round her wrists, lashing them together, then secured them to the strong struts of the fine old brass bedstead. That was a bit of luck, her having one like that; he couldn’t have done it with a divan or a solid headboard. He tied her firmly so that she could not get her arms free.

  Fighting the pain and the terror, Felicity made a supreme effort, kicking at him as he moved back from her and began to fumble with her clothes. Her legs flailed.

  But he had the knife in his hand again, and held it against her breast. She could feel the blade pressing down on her. She shrank back then, eyes staring at him frantically above the gag, and he moved the knife away, but still she resisted, more passively now, making her legs heavy as he tried to pull off her boots, keeping her ankles rigid, feet pointing upwards. She kicked out again. It made him angry.

  ‘Stop that. It will be worse if you don’t,’ he said.

  He dragged at her slacks. They were tight, and it was more difficult than with Valerie, for she still mutely resisted, lying stiff, pressing herself into the bed. Rage at her opposition made him desperate. He caught at her legs, meaning to raise her hips, but she writhed and wriggled, still making sounds, and he jabbed her in the side with the point of the knife. As she struggled, she moved against it and it sank into her flesh. Ronald withdrew it so that the point lay on her flat, white belly. He did not see the blood that came from the wound; there was, in fact, very little, but she stopped struggling.

  After that it was easy, and he left her sprawled out on the bed, not unlike some of the pictures he had spent so long gloating over, the light still on.

  Ronald went calmly down the stairs and out through the back door to where he had left his things. He put on his raincoat and tweed hat and walked quickly along the side of the house and into the street. There was no one about as he strode off down the road.

  He felt very peaceful, drained not only by the act itself but by the struggle.

  Back in his van, he smiled as he slid the knife, wrapped up in the balaclava helmet, under the seat. Then he drove home to Nancy.

  Upstairs in her bedroom, still tied to the bed and still gagged, Felicity stirred a little.

  Ronald dwelt mentally on the sensual pleasure and release of his experience as he drove towards Tellingford. Gradually the violence faded from his mind until it was as though that part had never happened. He’d barely touched her with the knife; it had been just a sharp prod, to make her obey him. She’d been punished now, just like Valerie.

  Before reaching home, he stopped to take off his black sweater and put on his corduroy jacket, and the tie he had removed earlier. He combed his thick hair neatly, slicking it back past his ears.

  Nancy was watching a programme about battered babies on television when he entered the house.

  ‘Terrible, the things people do,’ she said, turning it off when he came in, to give him her full attention. His dinner was keeping warm in the oven, and he ate it all up, every bit. Afterwards, he showed her what he had bought in Dewton and she was delighted with his success.

  The van seemed quite all right now, he said. Luckily it had failed quite near a garage and he hadn’t had to walk far, he told her, before he found help.

  He drank three cups of tea, when Nancy brewed a pot before they went to bed.

  Felicity’s eyes would not focus properly.

  The terrible figure in the weird helmet and black clothes seemed to have gone, and the room was quiet except for a strange banging sound. She did not realise that the noise she heard was her own struggling heart.

  Her arms, still tied above her head, ached unbearably; her wrists rubbed raw against the chafing twine. She was too tired to try any longer to free them.

  He had been so strong, that man, and so heavy, weighing her down, crushing her under him, taking away her strength.

  She lapsed into unconsciousness some time before, at last, she died.

  12

  The Ristorante Sorrento was in a narrow street that led to Fletcham Abbey from the market square. Within, concealed lighting was augmented by candles inside large goblets on each table.

  Daniel and Vivian arrived there in good time, on Wednesday evening, for their dinner with his parents. He had sold the idea to his mother as a delayed celebration for her birthday, and she had agreed to drive down after work. She had changed her job again and was now with a small firm that handled sales promotions. By working through her lunch hour, consuming yoghurt in the office, she was able to leave early and reach Fletcham at the agreed hour.

  Daniel wore his suit, which showed how important the evening was to him, and Vivian was in a flowing dress of Indian origin, with small animals and emblems in purplish colours printed on a neutral ground. Her legs were sensibly encased in her lined boots. Both wore identical shaggy sheepskin coats which they’d bought at a second-hand shop; imperfectly cured, they smelled faintly as the waiter bore them away to a remote cupboard.

  The Sorrento was a place to which students at Fletcham University went only rarely, when their grants had arrived or their exams were over, or on other special occasions. Some of the more old-fashioned ones took particular partners there when laying the groundwork for a sexual siege; Daniel and Vivian had been there several times. The menu, pinned in the window, could be studied without commitment, and a plan made in advance to obtain value for money without embarrassment. In fact, this was what the Sorrento supplied – modest pasta dishes, veal or chicken served in various ways, and inexpensive wines from Tuscany at a reasonable cost, though you could go mad, if you wished, among the a la carte. At midday, businessmen from the district lunched there on their expense accounts. The restaurant, a family concern with few outside employees, flourished.

  ‘Ah, good evening, Mario,’ said Daniel suavely, as the proprietor’s eldest son, the head waiter, greeted them. ‘I’ve booked a table for four. My parents are joining us. Fortescue’s the name,’ he added anxiously, in case Mario did not remember their earlier encounters.

  ‘Of course, Mr Fortescue. Bene. I have this nice table for you,’ said Mario, who had lived all his life in England but cultivated a heavy accent. He led them to a table
in a corner, partly screened from the entrance by a buttress.

  Daniel and Vivian sat down, and Daniel ordered a carafe of the house red wine.

  ‘Plenty of plonk. That’ll help,’ he said to Vivian, and swallowed half a glass himself as soon as it came. ‘Dad’ll be first, you’ll see. He’s always so punctual. But Mum won’t be late, exactly. She’ll be a bit breathless, though, as if she is. Maybe she’ll be five minutes behind time.’

  ‘You’re scared,’ said Vivian.

  ‘Yes.’ Daniel loosened his tie and laughed in an embarrassed way. ‘This is a new scene for me – trying to get my parents to kiss and make up.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Vivian, patting his hand. ‘They’re civilised people, after all. Just relax.’

  George and Angela were civilised people and, when they met in the market square after parking their cars at opposite ends of it, they realised at once what had happened. They had, in fact, driven along the same road into Fletcham, for George had taken the car to the office in order to drive straight down, but he had found his way directly through the town, while Angela had taken some false turns.

  They made no scene. They never had, in their years together.

  ‘They’ve asked you too?’ said Angela, to confirm it. ‘Daniel and Vivian?’

  ‘Yes.’ George fiddled with the keys of his car. ‘Shall I go away?’

  ‘Of course not. That would upset them,’ said Angela. Then she added suspiciously, ‘You didn’t ask them to arrange it, did you?’ She remembered the pendant he had sent her; it had surprised her, for it was lovely and unlike any gift she had had from him before. She would send it back, naturally, but had not got round to doing so yet. She decided not to mention it.

  ‘I did nothing of the kind,’ said George crossly.

  ‘No. You were never devious. Well, don’t let’s disappoint them. They must have got everything planned. They’ll expect you first since you’re always early for things. You go ahead. I’ll come a minute or two later.’