Finally, she found the courage to speak, ‘Do you remember me?’
‘You,’ he said, in that familiar raspy whisper. ‘You were in my house.’
‘Yes,’ she said, gaining strength as they talked, feeling the hardness of the solid glass in her hand.
‘Why? What are you trying to do to me?’
Sue didn’t answer. Now that she had found him, she had said all she wanted to.
‘Why?’ he repeated.
She noticed that he was moving towards her very slowly, closing the gap as he talked.
‘You know what you are,’ she said, bringing her hand out of the shoulder bag. Then she took a sudden step towards him and shouted, ‘Come on, then! Here I am. Come on, do it. Finish me!’
She could see the confusion and horror on his face as she continued moving towards him. ‘Come on. What’s wrong with you? Do it!’
But he kept on backing away as Sue edged closer, paperweight out in her hand now. He stretched out his arms before him as if to ward her off, and immediately she knew. She knew that he needed surprise to succeed. He was a coward. And what must she look like, she wondered, coming towards him with a fist of thick glass held out and all the rage of a ruined life in her face and voice? It didn’t bear thinking about. The miserable bastard was terrified and his fear unnerved her for a moment.
He must have sensed her confusion like an animal scents its prey, for he began to smile as he slowed his retreat. In a moment he would start walking towards her again. But he had already gone too far. On his next slow step backwards, one of the rotten boards shifted under him and he wobbled at the edge. He waved his arms like a semaphorist, a look of terror on his face, and Sue almost reached forward to help him. Almost. But he regained his balance and again she saw that other face, the one his human mask barely hid. She took a pace forward and kicked out hard at him. Her foot connected with his groin and he tottered back towards the edge of the cliff with a scream.
The fence was low there, only about a foot or so off the ground, and the post stood at an odd angle, crooked, pointing out to sea. As he fell backwards, his clothing snagged on the rusted barbed wire and he managed to turn himself around. He was half over the edge but his hands clawed at the thick tufts of grass. The more he struggled, the more the wire seemed to wrap him up, and when she moved closer, Sue could see blood seeping through his clothes. He grunted and snatched at the sods as he tried to stop himself from slowly sliding over. Sue knelt down and smashed at his hands with the paperweight. The fence post twitched like a dowsing rod as he howled and struggled, snatching at the barbed wire now, anything to get a grip, his hands coming away crushed, ripped and bloody. Only his head and shoulders showed above the edge now. The wire had torn one sleeve right off his jacket and its barbs stuck in the skin beneath. The post was almost out of the ground, pointing out to sea, and the more he struggled the more he slipped.
At last he managed to find a foothold in the cliff face just below the edge, but his hands were so badly damaged that all he could do was push himself up with his feet and flail his arms about. The barbed wire tied him to the edge but his feet pushed him away. Sue stood up, raised the paperweight and hit him on the side of his head. The jolt ran all the way up her arm. Blood filled his eye. She hit out again, this time catching him over the ear. He screamed and put one hand to the wound. The post broke free of its shallow pit and shot over the cliff side, taking him with it. Sue knelt right at the edge and saw him twist around in the wire like an animal in a trap before he tore free and plunged.
Far below, the sea lapped and spumed around the rocks at the base of the cliff, and the body, arms and legs whirling, hit them with a thud louder than the breaking waves themselves. Sue could see him down there, slumped and broken over the sharp dark rocks, where the foaming waves licked at him like the tongues of madmen.
It was done. Sue looked back towards the distant church and thought of the normal, day-to-day world that lay below it in the town. What would she do now that it was over? Should she follow him? It would be so easy just to relax and let herself slide over the edge to oblivion.
But no. Suicide wasn’t part of her destiny. Her own death had been her stake, what she had risked, but it was not part of the bargain if she won. She had to accept her fate, whatever it might be: live with the guilt, if such she felt, or pay for her crimes if she was caught. But there was no giving in to suicide. She was free of her burden now, come what may.
She had no idea if the police were close to discovering her identity. Perhaps they were already waiting back at Mrs Cummings’ to arrest her. And then there was Keith McLaren, still in a coma. What if he woke up and remembered everything? On the other hand, he might have brain damage or amnesia. If so, was it possible that he would spend his days trying to piece together the fragments of his memory by himself, and, if he succeeded, would he hunt down the woman who had so suddenly and without provocation wrecked his life? She didn’t know. She might have created another like herself, someone with a bit of the undead in him.
But no matter how bleak some of the possibilities seemed, she felt free at last. More than that, she was Kirsten again. Even imprisonment would be a kind of freedom now. It didn’t really matter what happened because she had done what had to be done. Now she was free.
Certainly her best bet would be to get out of town and back to Sarah first thing in the morning and destroy anything that might link her to the place. That’s what she would do. Perhaps she could also tint her hair and make sure she looked like none of the girls who had been in Whitby.
All Kirsten really wanted to do at the moment, she realized, looking towards the church, was crawl into one of those box pews marked FOR STRANGERS ONLY, kneel and offer a prayer of sorts, then curl up on the green baize and sleep. But the place would be locked up for the night.
As she got to her feet, the paperweight slipped out of her sweaty palm, bounced on the springy grass and fell over the edge. She leaned forward to watch and saw the glass shatter against a rock in a shower of white powder like a wave breaking. Free of its cage, the rose seemed to drift up on a current of warm air. Its crimson petals opened, pale in the moonlight, then slowly it floated back down and a departing wave carried it out to sea.
afterword
‘8th September 1987
Coast road, Whitby-Staithes. Rolling farmland, patchwork of hedged fields (cows grazing) light brown after harvest & wheat-coloured barley etc. End abruptly at cliffs, pinkish strata, sea clear light blue, sun glinting silver on distant ship. Flock of gulls on red-brown field. Clumps of trees in hollows. Cluster of village houses, light stone, red pantile roofs: “. . . arrived at the small coastal town at 11.15 a.m. in early September, her mind made up.”’
Such were the humble origins of Caedmon’s Song, I discover, looking back over my notebook for August 1987, to March 1988. I wrote the book in the late eighties, then, after my first four Inspector Banks novels. I remember I needed a change; a novel in which the police played a subsidiary role. Ever since reading about the Yorkshire Ripper, I’d had an idea for a story about someone who had survived a serial killer’s attack setting out for revenge.
The idea lay fallow, as these things often do, until one September day in 1987, when we crested the hill into Whitby, shortly before the above-described trip to Staithes, when the original opening revealed itself. There lay Whitby, spread out below. The colours seemed somehow brighter and more vibrant than I remembered: the greens and blues of the North Sea, the red pantile roofs. Then there was the dramatic setting of the lobster-claw harbour and the two opposing hills, one capped with a church and a ruined abbey, the other with Captain Cook’s statue and the massive jawbone of a whale. I knew immediately that this was where the story had to take place, and that it began with a woman getting off a bus, feeling a little travel-sick, trying the place on for size.
When I heard that Macmillan planned to publish this novel in 2003, I toyed with the idea of rewriting it and updating it. After all, isn’t it ever
y writer’s dream to get another chance years later at improving something one wrote in one’s early days? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it just wouldn’t work, that the world has changed so much since 1987, and that the events in Caedmon’s Song couldn’t happen in a world with mobile phones, e-mail, a McDonald’s or Pizza Hut on every corner, and the current techniques of DNA testing. Genetic fingerprinting existed back then, as Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding demonstrates very well, but it was still in its infancy. Besides, I was supposed to be leaving the police behind. Given the advances in forensic science since 1987, it seemed that if I were to update the book for 2003, it would be almost impossible to keep them in the background. Whitby has changed, too, especially the footpath along the top of the cliffs which plays such an important role in the book.
In the end, I settled for correcting a few minor points, changing a character’s name, getting rid of an obtrusive comment about Margaret Thatcher. That sort of thing. In all other respects it’s the original novel, now a period piece of sorts, a slice of late twentieth-century history, set in a time when you could smoke anywhere, get bed and breakfast for £9.50 a night and Crocodile Dundee was all the rage!
Caedmon’s Song Page 27