River of Darkness jm-1

by Rennie Airth

  Professor Freud, as you may know, has developed a technique of free association in analysis,' he bent towards Madden again, 'but it's hard for a patient to concentrate on retrieving some memory from the past when all he is wondering is whether he can reach the end of the session without turning into an icicle!'

  Helen Blackwell's laughter brought Madden the memory of a grassy bank and the sound of a blackbird's call.

  'So here I am, earning a crust as they say.' He glanced about him. 'The Society feels it would be of benefit to introduce psychoanalysis to a wider public in Britain. Well and good, I say. Unfortunately, to most outsiders psychiatry equals Freud equals sex.' He looked droll. 'One has only to mention his name in front of a roomful of Englishmen and half a dozen of them turn red with embarrassment.'

  A figure was hovering behind him. Dr Weiss looked round. 'Yes, of course — forgive me. I shall only be a moment longer.' He addressed Helen. 'I leave for Manchester tomorrow. Then Edinburgh. But I shall return to London in a week and I will get in touch with you. Perhaps we could have lunch together? Yes?'

  'Of course, Franz. But you must come down to Highfield and see Father again.'

  He took her hands and kissed them as before. He bowed to Madden — 'Inspector.' With a smile at them both, he turned and joined a group of men waiting behind him.

  Helen took Madden's arm and they moved off down the aisle between the chairs.

  'Are you one of those half-dozen, John Madden?'

  'Certainly not.'

  'Yes, I believe you're blushing.'

  They went down the stairs and out into the soft evening light. The plane trees in the square were bowed under the weight of summer foliage. The air was warm and heavy with the dust of the city.

  'Would you like to hear about Sophy? She started talking again a week ago. I spoke to Dr Mackay in Edinburgh. So far she hasn't mentioned that night, and when Dr Mackay asked her about it she went silent for another two days. It was a warning — "Keep off!" But she hasn't asked for her mother, and Dr Mackay thinks she knows and accepts that she won't see her again.'

  He told her about the drawings. 'We believe the man who broke in was wearing a gas mask. I don't know if you've ever seen one. They're quite hideous. A child would have been terrified.'

  They continued slowly around the square. She kept hold of his arm, walking close beside him, her body brushing against his.

  'Would you like to have dinner?' he asked, unsure how to proceed. He didn't want her to think he was taking anything for granted.

  'Yes, please. I haven't eaten all day.' She looked directly at him. 'Then could we go back to your place?

  I'm staying with a girlfriend in Kensington. I'd like to take you there, but she's terribly strait-laced and I simply haven't the courage.'

  She smiled into his eyes and he smiled back, his heart lifting. He found it hard to believe there was anything in the world for which she did not have the courage.

  They sat across from each other in the restaurant.

  Candlelight brought out the glint of gold in her hair.

  She told him about her marriage.

  'I met Guy when we were students, but he gave up medicine and decided to read law instead. He was still doing that when the war began. Each time he came home on leave it was harder. I had to try to remember why I'd married him, why I'd loved him. When he was killed, all I could think was that I'd failed him and now I'd never have a chance to make it right.'

  Madden's wife had been a schoolteacher. They had been shy with each other, still strangers after two years of marriage. He had difficulty now recalling her features, or those of their baby daughter who had died at the age of six months, within days of her mother.

  During the war he had come almost to forget them, as though their deaths had ceased to matter in the great slaughter going on around him. Later he had tried to recover his feelings, to mourn afresh, but they remained dim in his memory and he never spoke of them now.

  Instead, he talked to her about the case. He told her about the murder of the farmer's wife at Bentham.

  'We haven't put it out, but we think it was done by the same man. We don't understand his reasons for killing. We can't find a motive that makes sense.'

  She wanted to know what had happened to him and Will Stackpole in the woods at Highfield. Lord Stratton had told them little about the ambush and she was shocked when she heard the details. 'You could have been killed, both of you. Was it terrifying, being trapped like that? Were you very afraid?'

  'Not really. Not enough-' He stopped, conscious of what he had said. When he didn't go on, she asked, 'Was that how you felt in the war?'

  He nodded. He found it hard to speak. 'Towards the end, yes. There seemed no point in being afraid any more. Either you survived or you didn't. But when I felt the same thing up in the woods, it was as though I'd never escaped from it — that feeling that nothing mattered any longer.'

  She took his hand in hers.

  The past two weeks had not been easy ones for Helen Blackwell. The problem of fitting an affair into her busy, tightly structured life had occupied her mind at length. But she had also found herself wondering whether she was wise, after all, to involve herself with a man so clearly suffering from inner torments.

  Her wartime work had taught her much about the effects of prolonged exposure to trench warfare. Everywhere in the land there were men who woke each morning unable to control their trembling limbs and eyelids, who started at the sound of a door being slammed and dived for cover when a car backfired. She knew what mental efforts were required by those who remained active and in command of their lives.

  Returning to London, she had not been surprised to feel a renewal of physical desire when they met. The mysterious bonds of sexual attraction drew her to this silent man. There was no wishing them away. What she was unprepared for was the sudden rush of tenderness that had filled her when she glanced over her shoulder and found his anxious, troubled eyes searching for hers.

  Later, he took her to his rooms off the Bayswater Road. To rhe shame of peeling paint and stained wallpaper and the sour smell of rented furniture. Here was a truth he could not hide from her: that he had ceased to care how he lived. A photograph of his dead wife and child, standing on a side table, was all he had salvaged from his past. She asked him their names and he told her. Alice and Margaret. Margaret after his mother, who had died when he was a boy.

  When he began to speak, to make some apology for the place he had brought her to, she stopped his lips with hers. 'Come.' She took his hand and led him into the bedroom.

  At the sight of her naked body, white and gold and rose-tipped, he started to tremble, and when they lay down together he continued to shake helplessly. She held him in her strong arms, saying nothing, pressing his body to hers, her cheek to his. After a while she began to kiss him, first on his face and throat, then on his chest, her breath warm on his skin. His body was marked by wounds: one shaped like a star under his breastbone, the legacy of a bullet that had passed clean through him, somehow missing his heart, the other a jagged ridge of tissue on his hip from the same shrapnel blast that had torn his arm. Her lips moved freely over his scarred body, until he could bear it no longer. When he reached for her she was ready.

  'I've thought about this every day.'

  He was inside her in a moment, but this time she checked him. Slowed him. 'It's so lovely… let's make it last.'

  Even so, for him it was over too soon. Too soon.

  But she kissed him and held him to her and he heard her soft laugh again.

  'What was it Franz was saying?' Breathless beneath him.

  He fell asleep and dreamed of a youth named Jamie Wallace who had once been a student at the Guildhall in London. One of the young men with whom Madden had enlisted and trained, he'd been the possessor of a sweet tenor voice and had often entertained the other men with ballads of the day. On the first morning of the Somme he and Madden had found themselves side by side in the forward trench. All night
the artillery bombardment had sounded. At sunrise it ceased and a small miracle had occurred. Larks arose from the blasted fields and canals all around and the sky had been full of the sound of them. 'Do you hear that?'

  Jamie Wallace had asked, his face lighting up. In Madden's dream his lips framed the same silent question. Do you hear that? A moment later the whistle had sounded for the start of the attack and the men had gone up the ladders into the lark-filled morning.

  Madden awoke in tears to find her asleep beside him, her hair spread out over the pillow. Before undressing she had draped her red silk shawl over the bedside lamp and at the sight of her body, naked and glowing in the rosy light, his grief dissolved. As he drew up the sheet to cover them she reached out in her sleep and he moved quickly, easing himself into the circle of her arms, careful not to wake her.

  Hefting his leather holdall, Amos Pike climbed over the stile, glancing back as he did so to make sure he wasn't being followed. As always, he was taking a roundabout route to his destination. He had grown up on the edge of a wood where wild things lived — foxes and badgers and a range of smaller predators — and had learned early from his father how skilled most were at disguising their rracks.

  When he came to a ditch separating two fields he stepped into it and continued on his way, unseen, walking with long springy strides in the shadow of a hawthorn hedge. Today was Tuesday, not a day he normally had off, but Mrs Aylward had gone to visit her sister in Stevenage for the week, taking the train, and apart from chores in the garden his time was his own until Friday evening. Usually he could count on being free one weekend out of two, though Mrs Aylward would occasionally change her plans at the last minute and when she did so he was expected to conform, cancelling his own arrangements. He did so without complaint. His job had advantages of a rare kind. Unlooked-for opportunities had come his way.

  He was approaching a small hamlet, a group of cottages at a crossroads surrounded by fields and orchards, and he paused in the shade of the hedge for several minutes while he scanned the scene. It was nearly one o'clock. Those of the inhabitants who were home would most likely be eating lunch. He didn't wish to be seen by anyone. Satisfied, he walked on and came to a narrow dirt track that led to a gate in the back fence of a small thatched cottage, separated from the rest of the village by an apple orchard and unploughed fields.

  He unlatched the gate and went into the garden.

  Pausing to run his eye over the small patch of lawn and the bed of hollyhocks and sweet peas growing against the cottage wall, he decided to spend an hour later trimming the grass and weeding the bed. He made a practice of keeping the place tidy, reasoning that if he did so it would discourage others from offering the same service to the occupant of the cottage. Pike had no interest in the garden, or its owner. It was the long wooden shed at the side of the lawn that was of concern to him and he aimed by indirect means to keep others away from it.

  Depositing the holdall on the ground beside the door of the shed, he unstrapped it and took out a brown-paper parcel, which he carried across the lawn to the kitchen door. He entered the house without knocking.

  'Who's there?' The husky quaver came from a room inside.

  Pike didn't reply, but he walked from the kitchen through a hallway into a small parlour at the front of the cottage where an old woman sat by the lace-netted window nursing a fat tabby.

  'Is that you, Mr Grail?' The eyes she turned towards him were covered with a greyish film. In spite of the heat she wore a woollen shawl tucked over the shoulders of her faded quilted gown. 'I was expecting you last week.'

  'I couldn't come, Mrs Troy,' Pike said, in his cold voice. 'I had to work.'

  'I ran out of tea.' The timid voice held a note of apology. 'I had to borrow some from Mrs Church.'

  Pike frowned. 'You should have said you were short.' He saw her flinch at his words and tried to check the natural harshness of his tone. 'I brought you a packet. Plus some shortbread. You asked for that.'

  'Did you bring me any fish?' She spoke in a near whisper, turning her face away, as though afraid of his response.

  'No.' He was losing patience. Her existence meant nothing to him, beyond the fact that it should continue.

  'They don't sell fish where I am,' he lied brutally. 'I brought you eggs and bacon and ham. And bread and rice. I'll put it away in the larder.'

  A minute later he was outside again, crossing the lawn to the shed. Had Winifred Troy still possessed her sight she would hardly have recognized the structure.

  Pike had replaced the former roof with sheets of corrugated iron, boarded over the single window and fitted a new door equipped with a heavy padlock opened by a key, which he kept about his person at all times.

  The shed dated from a time, some years before, when Mrs Troy and her husband, who had since died, had let the cottage to an artist from the city. With their agreement he had built a studio in the small garden and had used the cottage as a weekend retreat and holiday home. By far the most radical alteration Pike had made was to knock down the end wall and install a pair of stable doors in its place. These opened on to the dirt track which ran through the fields and orchards for half a mile before joining a paved road.

  Wrinkling his nose at the musty, airless smell, Pike latched the door shut behind him. It was dark in the shed and he lit a paraffin lamp at once. In the artist's day there had been ample illumination from a pair of skylights in the roof, but these had gone. Amos Pike disliked the idea of being overlooked.

  The space inside the shed was mainly given over to a large object, covered with a dust cloth, which stood in the middle of the cement floor. Pike removed the cloth with a flick of his wrist: a motorcycle and sidecar were revealed beneath.

  The shed quickly grew hot, the radiation of the lamp combining with the hot sun on the corrugated iron roof to turn the room into an oven. Pike took off his shirt. His heavily muscled body bore a number of scars, large and small. He put his holdall on a table and took from it a half-gallon tin of red paint and a pair of brushes. He had bought the paint in a hardware store that morning after having been assured by the salesman that it would adhere to metal. He prised off the lid of the tin with a chisel, spread a sheet of newspaper on the floor and sat down cross-legged. He began to paint over the black bodywork.

  His movements were precise and, like all his physical actions, governed by a sense of economy and order.

  This pattern of behaviour had been acquired at an early age and was the result of an event in his life so catastrophic he had only been able to continue his existence by recourse to a system of interlocking disciplines that guaranteed him control over his every waking moment.

  Tormented for years by the terror and anguish of his dreams, he had lately found them diminished both in power and frequency. While he could not have framed such a thought himself, it was as though his subconscious had finally worn itself out and ceded the battlefield to his iron will.

  Having lived with his grandparents for some years, he had gone for a soldier at the age of sixteen and found a way of life ideally suited to his needs, the strict demands of military practice fitting easily into his own more rigorous code. He had prospered to the extent of his capacities and by the time war broke out had already attained the rank of sergeant. For a while he had been employed as an instructor at a training depot, but when his battalion was posted to the front he had assumed his former position as a company sergeant.

  Wounded on several occasions, he nevertheless managed to survive in rhe lottery of trench warfare, and the summer of 1917 had found him, now a company sergeant major, engaged with his battalion in the British offensive south of Ypres at the start of the months-long agony that would later be called Passchendaele.

  During the bitter struggle for control of the Menin Road, Pike's company had come under heavy fire from the German artillery. Crouched behind a tree stump he saw a man's head blown off as neatly as if it had been hewn with an axe, the trunk stumbling on for several paces before collapsing. Next
moment he was flung high into the air by an exploding shell that buried itself in the ground a few yards away.

  He awoke to find himself lying in a crater with the battle still raging around him. Concussed and barely conscious, he listened to the fluttering sound of shells as they streamed through the upper air overhead. A great cloud of smoke and dust hung over the battlefield.

  He saw men running past him on their way back to the lines, but when he opened his mouth to call to them no sound issued from his lips.

  He slept for a few hours, but woke towards evening and realized for the first time that he had received a slight wound to his wrist. Although his limbs were undamaged he found he had no desire to move from where he was, lying on the slope of the crater, staring up at the violet sky. From habit he removed the field dressing sewn into the flap of his tunic and poured iodine into the cut on his wrist. He discovered he still had his water-bottle with him and he drank from it.

  At that moment he became aware that he was not alone in the crater. A man from his own company named Hallett lay on the opposite slope, curled up on his side, hugging his blood-soaked tunic. He was calling out faintly, begging for water. Pity had never stirred in the icy heart of Amos Pike, and he watched in silence as the man died.

  During the night it began to rain, a hard, driving, relentless downpour, which turned the dry, powdery dust of the battlefield into a quagmire. The battle resumed before dawn. German mortar shells whistled overhead. Smoking clods of earth were flung into the crater. By the blanching flare of a rocket Pike saw troops moving forward weighed down with rolls of wire and pigeon baskets, picks and shovels, but he made no attempt to attract their attention.

  Morning came. The body of Hallett had vanished.

  He saw nothing but mud all around him. Mud and the stumps of trees, and bodies, or parts of bodies nearby he spied a hand holding a mug, nothing more.

  The crater became a lake of liquefied mud and when he dozed off he slid down the slope and had to claw his way back up, covered in clayey ooze. The rain had stopped and presently the sun came out. Pike slept again. When he awoke he discovered that the mud had formed a hard crust about his body. It would have been a simple matter to break it, but he found he was content to lie where he was, immobile, his limbs held fast in the mud's embrace.