The development brought gasps from the public gallery, an exodus from the press benches, mutters of disbelief and anger from the jury; but Foulsham experienced only relief. When the court rose as though to celebrate the turn of events he thought the case was over until he saw that the judge was withdrawing to speak to the lawyers. “The swine,” the tobacconist whispered fiercely, glaring at Fishwick. “He made all those people testify for nothing.”
Soon the judge and the lawyers returned. It had apparently been decided that the defence should call several psychiatrists to state their views of Fishwick’s mental condition. The first of them had scarcely opened his mouth, however, when Fishwick began to express impatience as severe as Foulsham sensed more than one of the jurors were suffering. The man in the dock protruded his tongue like a caricature of a madman and emitted a creditable imitation of a jolly banjo which all but drowned out the psychiatrist’s voice. Eventually the judge had Fishwick removed from the court, though not without a struggle, and the psychiatrists were heard.
Fishwick’s mother had died giving birth to him, and his father had never forgiven him. The boy’s first schoolteacher had seen the father tearing up pictures Fishwick had painted for him. There was some evidence that the father had been prone to uncontrollable fits of violence against the child, though the boy had always insisted that he had broken his own leg by falling downstairs. All of Fishwick’s achievements as a young man seemed to have antagonised the father - his exercising his leg for years until he was able to conceal his limp, his enrolment in an art college, the praise which his teachers heaped on him and which he valued less than a word of encouragement from his father. He’d been in his twenties, and still living with his father, when a gallery had offered to exhibit his work. Nobody knew what his father had said which had caused Fishwick to destroy all his paintings in despair and to overcome his disgust at working in his father’s shop in order to learn the art of butchery. Before long he had been able to rent a bed-sitter, and thirteen months after moving into it he’d tracked down one of his former schoolfellows who used to call him “Quasimodo” on account of his limp and his dispirited slouch. Four victims later, Fishwick had made away with his father and the law had caught up with him.
Very little of this had been leaked to the press. Foulsham found himself imagining Fishwick brooding sleeplessly in a cheerless room, his creative nature and his need to prove himself festering within him until he was unable to resist the compulsion to carry out an act which would make him feel meaningful. The other jurors were less impressed. “I might have felt some sympathy for him if he’d gone straight for his father,” the hairdresser declared once they were in the jury room.
Fishwick had taken pains to refine his technique first, Foulsham thought, and might have said so if the tobacconist hadn’t responded. “I’ve no sympathy for that cold fish,” the man said between puffs at a briar. “You can see he’s still enjoying himself. He only pleaded not guilty so that all those people would have to be reminded what they went through.”
“We can’t be sure of that,” Foulsham protested.
“More worried about him than about his victims, are you?” the tobacconist demanded, and the optician intervened. “I know it seems incredible that anyone could enjoy doing what he did,” she said to Foulsham, “but that creature’s not like us.”
Foulsham would have liked to be convinced of that. After all, if Fishwick weren’t insane, mustn’t that mean anyone was capable of such behaviour? “I think he pleaded guilty when he realised that everyone was going to hear all those things about him he wanted to keep secret,” he said. “I think he thought that if he pleaded guilty the psychiatrists wouldn’t be called.”
The eleven stared at him. “You think too much,” the tobacconist said.
The hairdresser broke the awkward silence by clearing her throat. “I never thought I’d say this, but I wish they’d bring back hanging just for him.”
“That’s the Christmas present he deserves,” said the veterinarian who had crumpled the evidence.
The foreman of the jury, a bank manager, proposed that it was time to discuss what they’d learned at the trial. “Personally, I don’t mind where they lock him up so long as they throw away the key.”
His suggestion didn’t satisfy most of the jurors. The prosecuting counsel had questioned the significance of the psychiatric evidence, and the judge had hinted broadly in his summing-up that it was inconclusive. It took all the jurors apart from Foulsham less than half-an-hour to dismiss the notion that Fishwick might have been unable to distinguish right from wrong, and then they gazed expectantly at Foulsham, who had a disconcerting sense that Fishwick was awaiting his decision too. “I don’t suppose it matters where they lock him up,” he began, and got no further; the rest of the jury responded with cheers and applause, which sounded ironic to him. Five minutes later they’d agreed to recommend a life sentence for each of Fishwick’s crimes. “That should keep him out of mischief,” the bank manager exulted.
As the jury filed into the courtroom Fishwick leaned forwards to scrutinise their faces. His own was blank. The foreman stood up to announce the verdict, and Foulsham was suddenly grateful to have that done on his behalf. He hoped Fishwick would be put away for good. When the judge confirmed six consecutive life sentences, Foulsham released a breath which he hadn’t been aware of holding. Fishwick had shaken his head when asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed, and his face seemed to lose its definition as he listened to the judge’s pronouncement. His gaze trailed across the jury as he was led out of the dock.
Once Foulsham was out of the building, in the crowded streets above which glowing Santas had been strung up, he didn’t feel as liberated as he’d hoped. Presumably that would happen when sleep had caught up with him. Just now he was uncomfortably aware of how all the mannequins in the store windows had been twisted into posing. Whenever shoppers turned from gazing into a window he thought they were emerging from the display. As he dodged through the shopping precinct, trying to avoid shoppers rendered angular by packages, families mined with small children, clumps of onlookers surrounding the open suitcases of street traders, he felt as if the maze of bodies were crippling his progress.
Foulsham’s had obviously been thriving in his absence. The shop was full of people buying Christmas cards and rolled-up posters and framed prints. “Are you glad it’s over?” Annette asked him. “He won’t ever be let out, will he?”
“Was he as horrible as the papers made out?” Jackie was eager to know.
“I can’t say. I didn’t see them,” Foulsham admitted, experiencing a surge of panic as Jackie produced a pile of tabloids from under the counter. “I’d rather forget,” he said hastily.
“You don’t need to read about it, Mr Foulsham, you lived through it,” Annette said. “You look as though Christmas can’t come too soon for you.”
“If I oversleep tomorrow I’ll be in on Monday,” Foulsham promised, and trudged out of the shop.
All the taxis were taken, and so he had to wait almost half-an-hour for a bus. If he hadn’t been so exhausted he might have walked home. As the bus laboured uphill he clung to the dangling strap which was looped around his wrist and stared at a grimacing rubber clown whose limbs were struggling to unbend from the bag into which they’d been forced. Bodies swayed against him like meat in a butcher’s lorry, until he was afraid of being trapped out of reach of the doors when the bus came to his stop.
As he climbed his street, where frost glittered as if the tarmac was reflecting the sky, he heard children singing carols in the distance or on television. He let himself into the house on the brow of the hill, and the poodles in the ground-floor flat began to yap as though he was a stranger. They continued barking while he sorted through the mail which had accumulated on the hall table: bills, advertisements, Christmas cards from people he hadn’t heard from since last year. “Only me, Mrs Hutton,” he called as he heard her and her stick plodding thro
ugh her rooms towards the clamour. Jingling his keys as further proof of his identity, and feeling unexpectedly like a jailer, he hurried upstairs and unlocked his door.
Landscapes greeted him. Two large framed paintings flanked the window of the main room: a cliff baring strata of ancient stone above a deserted beach, fields spiky with hedgerows and tufted with sheep below a horizon where a spire poked at fat clouds as though to pop them; beyond the window, the glow of street-lamps streamed downhill into a pool of light miles wide from which pairs of headlight beams were flocking. The pleasure and the sense of all-embracing calm which he habitually experienced on coming home seemed to be standing back from him. He dumped his suitcase in the bedroom and hung up his coat, then he took the radio into the kitchen.
He didn’t feel like eating much. He finished off a slice of toast laden with baked beans, and wondered whether Fishwick had eaten yet, and what his meal might be. As soon as he’d sluiced plate and fork he made for his armchair with the radio. Before long, however, he’d had enough of the jazz age. Usually the dance music of that era roused his nostalgia for innocence, not least because the music was older than he was, but just now it seemed too good to be true. So did the views on the wall and beyond the window, and the programmes on the television - the redemption of a cartoon Scrooge, commercials chortling “Ho ho ho”, an appeal on behalf of people who would be on their own at Christmas, a choir reiterating “Let nothing you display”, the syntax of which he couldn’t grasp. As his mind fumbled with it, his eyelids drooped. He nodded as though agreeing with himself that he had better switch off the television, and then he was asleep.
Fishwick wakened him. Agony flared through his right leg. As he lurched out of the chair, trying to blink away the blur which coated his eyes, he was afraid the leg would fail him. He collapsed back into the chair, thrusting the leg in front of him, digging his fingers into the calf in an attempt to massage away the cramp. When at last he was able to bend the leg without having to grit his teeth, he set about recalling what had invaded his sleep.
The nine o’clock news had been ending. It must have been a newsreader who had spoken Fishwick’s name. Foulsham hadn’t been fully awake, after all; no wonder he’d imagined that the voice sounded like the murderer’s. Perhaps it had been the hint of amusement which his imagination had seized upon, though would a newsreader have sounded amused? He switched off the television and waited for the news on the local radio station, twinges in his leg ensuring that he stayed awake.
He’d forgotten that there was no ten o’clock news. He attempted to phone the radio station, but five minutes of hanging on brought him only a message like an old record on which the needle had stuck, advising him to try later. By eleven he’d hobbled to bed. The newsreader raced through accounts of violence and drunken driving, then rustled her script. “Some news just in,” she said. “Police report that convicted murderer Desmond Fishwick has taken his own life while in custody. Full details in our next bulletin.”
That would be at midnight. Foulsham tried to stay awake, not least because he didn’t understand how, if the local station had only just received the news, the national network could have broadcast it more than ninety minutes earlier. But when midnight came he was asleep. He wakened in the early hours and heard voices gabbling beside him, insomniacs trying to assert themselves on a phone-in programme before the presenter cut them short. Foulsham switched off the radio and imagined the city riddled with cells in which people lay or paced, listening to the babble of their own caged obsessions. At least one of them -Fishwick - had put himself out of his misery. Foulsham massaged his leg until the ache relented sufficiently to let sleep overtake him.
The morning newscast said that Fishwick had killed himself last night, but little else. The tabloids were less reticent, Foulsham discovered once he’d dressed and hurried to the newsagent’s. MANIAC’S BLOODY SUICIDE. SAVAGE KILLER SAVAGES HIMSELF. HE BIT OFF MORE THAN HE COULD CHEW. Fishwick had gnawed the veins out of his arms and died from loss of blood.
He must have been insane to do that to himself, Foulsham thought, clutching his heavy collar shut against a vicious wind as he limped downhill. While bathing he’d been tempted to take the day off, but now he didn’t want to be alone with the images which the news had planted in him. Everyone around him on the bus seemed to be reading one or other of the tabloids which displayed Fishwick’s face on the front page like posters for the suicide, and he felt as though all the paper eyes were watching him. Once he was off the bus he stuffed his newspaper into the nearest bin.
Annette and Jackie met him with smiles which looked encouraging yet guarded, and he knew they’d heard about the death. The shop was already full of customers buying last-minute cards and presents for people they’d almost forgotten, and it was late morning before the staff had time for a talk. Foulsham braced himself for the onslaught of questions and comments, only to find that Jackie and Annette were avoiding the subject of Fishwick, waiting for him to raise it so that they would know how he felt, not suspecting that he didn’t know himself. He tried to lose himself in the business of the shop, to prove to them that they needn’t be so careful of him; he’d never realised how much their teasing and joking meant to him. But they hardly spoke to him until the last customer had departed, and then he sensed that they’d discussed what to say to him. “Don’t you let it matter to you, Mr Foulsham. He didn’t,” Annette said.
“Don’t you dare let it spoil your evening,” Jackie told him.
She was referring to the staff’s annual dinner. While he hadn’t quite forgotten about it, he seemed to have gained an impression that it hadn’t much to do with him. He locked the shop and headed for home to get changed. After twenty minutes of waiting in a bus queue whose disgruntled mutters felt like flies bumbling mindlessly around him he walked home, the climb aggravating his limp.
He put on his dress shirt and bow tie and slipped his dark suit out of the bag in which it had been hanging since its January visit to the cleaners. As soon as he was dressed he went out again, away from the sounds of Mrs Hutton’s three-legged trudge and of the dogs, which hadn’t stopped barking since he had entered the house. Nor did he care for the way Mrs Hutton had opened her door and peered at him with a suspiciousness which hadn’t entirely vanished when she saw him.
He was at the restaurant half an hour before the rest of the party. He sat at the bar, sipping a scotch and then another, thinking of people who must do so every night in preference to sitting alone at home, though might some of them be trying to avoid doing something worse? He was glad when his party arrived, Annette and her husband, Jackie and her new boyfriend, even though Annette’s greeting as he stood up disconcerted him. “Are you all right, Mr Foulsham?” she said, and he felt unpleasantly wary until he realised that she must be referring to his limp.
By the time the turkey arrived at the table the party had opened a third bottle of wine and the conversation had floated loose. “What was he like, Mr Foulsham,” Jackie’s boyfriend said, “the feller you put away?”
Annette coughed delicately. “Mr Foulsham may not want to talk about it.”
“It’s all right, Annette. Perhaps I should. He was—” Foulsham said, and trailed off, wishing that he’d taken advantage of the refuge she was offering. “Maybe he was just someone whose mind gave way.”
“I hope you’ve no regrets,” Annette’s husband said. “You should be proud.”
“Of what?”
“Of stopping the killing. He won’t kill anyone else.”
Foulsham couldn’t argue with that, and yet he felt uneasy, especially when Jackie’s boyfriend continued to interrogate him. If Fishwick didn’t matter, as Annette had insisted when Foulsham was closing the shop, why was everyone so interested in hearing about him? He felt as though they were resurrecting the murderer, in Foulsham’s mind if nowhere else. He tried to describe Fishwick, and related as much of his own experience of the trial as he judged they could stomach. All that he left unsaid se
emed to gather in his mind, especially the thought of Fishwick extracting the veins from his arms.
Annette and her husband gave him a lift home. He meant to invite them up for coffee and brandy, but the poodles started yapping the moment he climbed out of the car. “Me again, Mrs Hutton,” he slurred as he hauled himself along the banister. He switched on the light in his main room and gazed at the landscapes on the wall, but his mind couldn’t grasp them. He brushed his teeth and drank as much water as he could take, then he huddled under the blankets, willing the poodles to shut up.
He didn’t sleep for long. He kept wakening with a stale rusty taste in his mouth. He’d drunk too much, that was why he felt so hot and sticky and closed in. When he eased himself out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom the dogs began to bark. He rinsed out his mouth but was unable to determine if the water which he spat into the sink was discoloured. He crept out of the bathroom with a glass of water in each hand and crawled shivering into bed, trying not to grind his teeth as pictures which he would have given a good deal not to see rushed at him out of the dark.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 40