by Sam Taylor
Silence. Heavy breathing.
‘Yes or no?’
‘Yes.’
For some reason Graham was enunciating all his words in the most heavily sarcastic voice imaginable. Yet James had the feeling he was telling the truth, all the same.
‘That person, Graham, the person you blame . . . do you know where he is now?’
Graham turned on James then, his eyes furious, unstable. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ James replied, as calmly as he could. ‘That’s why I’m asking you.’
Graham turned away again, with a hollow laugh. ‘Yes.’
James felt his throat grow thick. He was close to the truth now. ‘Does he live in this city?’
‘You know he does.’
James was so shocked, he couldn’t speak. How did Graham know that he had seen Malcolm Trewvey? Suddenly he felt his ignorance, his amnesia, as a curse. This glowering stranger knew more about him than he knew about himself. There was a long silence. Graham turned to face him and said contemptuously, ‘Is that it?’
James looked at his face - the little red mouth like a tiny wound in the forest of black beard, the large nose, the vulnerable eyes - and felt a tremor of recognition. Had he known Graham, before? The question came out of his mouth before he could think about it.
‘Why do you hate me?’
Graham’s eyes turned red then. It sounds unlikely, but that is what James remembers: a kind of smoky demonic glow emanating from the irises and staining the whites. The skin of his face swelled purple; his lips were white and trembling. He looked like something from a horror film. This can’t have lasted more than a second or two, but it remained seared on James’s memory for several weeks afterwards.
The next thing he recalls is a black shadow across his eyes and the sensation of falling. He remembers the cold shock of the porcelain banging his lips and teeth and the taste of blood in his mouth. After that there was a blank, and then James was looking at his face, distorted and ugly, like the face of someone else, in a mirror, and walking home through darkness, coat pulled tight around his shivering body.
Back at the house, James gently washed his mouth and went to bed. He was exhausted but he couldn’t sleep. His speeding heart kept him awake, and so did that unanswered question: Why does Graham Oliver hate me? He turned the question over in his mind as he lay there, trying to recall if he could have done anything to offend Graham during his time at the house in Newland Road. Yet he had been so preoccupied then, he couldn’t really bring anything to mind. He found it difficult even to remember having had a conversation with him. Perhaps Graham had felt he was being snubbed? Yet James was sure that Graham was the one who, from the beginning, had been morose and unfriendly. So what was his problem? Was he paranoid or was he hiding something?
After several hours of dark thoughts, James finally got up and took a painkiller. He made himself a cup of tea and drank it. It was all too weird, too disturbing. The best thing, he decided, would be to forget all of this - these clues, these memories - and concentrate instead on his work in the house. As soon as he had made that decision, James felt relieved. He went back to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
For the next week he didn’t leave the house. The world seemed a dark and threatening place now, and anyway it was raining. He worked each day until his skin was ghostly with plasterdust and his tongue felt like sand.
On Sunday evening, lying in the bath, James admitted to himself that he would have to venture outside again tomorrow. The thought made him nervous, but he needed fresh food; he needed a steamer and a sander. He had also been thinking of buying a bed: his futon was uncomfortable, and the only way he could relax his bruised muscles was to lie in deep water, as he was now, replenishing it from the hot tap every ten minutes or so.
He had been in the bath for half an hour, and his fingers were wrinkled. There was no sound except for the hum of the generator and the echoing gurgles of the bathwater. He finished his beer and dropped the empty bottle over the side, then closed his eyes and sank below the water line. At peaceful moments such as this James sometimes found himself wondering about the clues he had discovered: the initials in the envelope addressed to Malcolm Trewvey, and what they might mean. But these thoughts were inseparable in his mind from the vicious beating he had received, the inexplicable hatred of Graham Oliver, and all his private investigations ended in darkness, confusion, fear. It was better to leave the past in the past, James told himself, to think only of the present.
But the present, for James, was a hard, dull place: an unvaryinglandscape of pallet knives and wallpaper and dust. And so, with the past off limits, he found himself daydreaming again about various possible branchings of the future. He imagined the house complete, a vision in white, and the money he would receive from its sale. He imagined different amounts of money, and how he might spend them. He imagined again a hot, unpeopled island, with his hut on the beach and his fishing lines, and he gave himself a Girl Friday too. Sometimes she looked like Ingrid and other times she was thin and dark-haired, her face a blur and her lips near his.
When James had dried himself, he walked quickly through to the bedroom and put on his pyjamas. With the curtains closed and the hurricane lamp on, he would try to read. He was still on the third page of Borges’s story, ‘Funes El Memorioso’, which he had begun reading six weeks before. For some reason James seemed able to read, and understand, no more than one sentence of this story each day. The odd thing was that, rather than getting lost and having to retrace what he had read before, he remembered it all with absolute clarity. The very slowness of his reading, the vast effort required to stay awake long enough to negotiate the labyrinths of Borges’s winding Spanish clauses and sub-clauses, the powers of imagination needed to form pictures of the things described and named (‘a huge slate-coloured storm’; the ‘Villa Los Laureles’) . . . all these seemed to burn the words of the story into James’s normally weak memory. When I finally finish reading this story, James thought, it will not be merely something I have read, it will be part of me; the memories of Funes and of the story’s narrator will be my memories too. That night, he read the sentence, ‘This new event, told by my cousin Bernardo, struck me as very much like a dream confected out of elements of the past.’ When he had fully comprehended and absorbed this sentence, James closed his eyes and sighed. ‘A dream confected out of elements of the past,’ he thought . . . isn’t that the perfect definition of a memory?
The next day, James drove to the industrial estate and bought a sander, a steamer, a stereo, some CDs and a bed. He also went to the supermarket and stocked up on food and drink. Then he took the receipts to Mr Crabtree, who counted out another pile of banknotes. It occurred to James while this was happening that his feelings towards money had changed. He no longer imagined it as a leech on his skin, sucking his lifeblood. Now he saw these rectangles of paper as thin slices of freedom. They were so light, they seemed almost to be weightless. In fact, James thought, it was as if they weighed less than nothing: the more he carried around in his pockets, the lighter he felt.
In the weeks that followed, he stripped the wallpaper in the bedrooms and the sitting room. It came away easily with the aid of the steamer, but the glue, softened by the warmth and humidity, stuck to his skin and gave him a rash on his hands and wrists. He worried vaguely about the allergy pills he had missed, and took two at once, to try to catch up on his dosage.
The next day his rash was worse so he went to see the doctor. The doctor nodded impatiently as James told him about the missed allergy pills. He asked for the name of the drug. James said he didn’t know, but he had brought the bottle. When he saw the round blue pills inside, the doctor’s expression changed. He told James he would like to run a lab analysis.
‘Don’t you know what they are?’ James asked.
‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘but I’m pretty sure they’re not what you think they are.’
The doctor gave James a prescription for a
llergy suppressants, and asked him to book an appointment with his secretary for the following week. James was irritated by the doctor’s mysterious tone, but he did what he was told.
It was five days later, while stripping the wallpaper in his bedroom, that James discovered the manuscript. He had noticed the bulge in the wallpaper before, but had presumed it must be a patch of damp. Only when a few pages floated loose did James begin to suspect the truth.
In all there were seventeen pages, typed and numbered. The title of the story was handwritten over dried whitener. As soon as James saw the title, he felt a bubble of apprehension and excitement in his stomach. He knew this was more than just a story. It was a clue. The title was . . .
Confessions of a Killer
CHAPTER 1
From the window at which I stand the world has an aspect at once beautiful and terrifying. It is, I think, often thus; men do not mark the wonder of creation until they notice the bottomless pit which gapes at their feet, separating them from the indifferent glory and eternity of nature. Perhaps even Adam never saw Paradise as such until the day he was without it. It is loss, or the premonition of loss, which makes us grateful for all we have. The blueness of the sky, the greenness of the lawn and leaves: how sad and yet so thrilling it would be to die on such a perfect summer’s day ... But I forsake my duties as narrator: I speak of the story’s end before its beginning. First I must retrace my steps; I must tell the dark tale of how it came to this.
My name is Martin Thwaite and, but three short years ago, my life was a simple and blameless one. I was nineteen years old and had, for the previous six months, been working as a general assistant to the famous detective Dr Lanark. My duties were sober and unglamorous: I answered Dr Lanark’s mail; I organised his schedule of appointments; I wrote up reports on the cases he investigated and filed them neatly away. But I was an eager young man. The romance of detection was in my blood, and as earnestly as Dr Lanark urged me to be always logical and pragmatic, to learn the theory of my trade before I hazarded an attempt at its practical side, he knew that I yearned to escape the desk at which I laboured and, like his other employees, to discover clues, to solve mysteries, to pursue dangerous villains through the city’s labyrinth of backstreets.
It was around three o’clock on a gloomy afternoon in November and I was in the process of finishing my paperwork for the week. Dr Lanark was with a client in his inner bureau; I had been busy with a report when the client entered the office and had not looked up, so all I knew about him was his name: Mr Gerard Ogilvy. It was perhaps half an hour later, when he emerged from Dr Lanark’s office, that I first caught sight of his face. I can still see him now, that poor gentleman: a tall, impressive, full-bodied man, and yet in such an obvious state of distress that I could only presume he had been cruelly reduced by some tragic circumstance. Soon afterwards, Dr Lanark came into the part of the office where I worked, and I heard him sigh. I asked him about the dreadful expression I had witnessed on the face of the young man, and he told me the story that lay behind it.
Mr Ogilvy, he explained, was a gentleman of some distinction - the eldest son of Lord Ogilvy - and also a brilliant young man in his own right. Although only seven years older than myself, he was expected to stand for Parliament the following year, after first marrying his beautiful and distinguished fiancée, Angelina Vierge. All of this was admirable, I agreed, but failed to explain the look of desolation I had seen on Mr Ogilvy’s face. Dr Lanark nodded. ‘You are right,’ he said, ‘though in fact, his troubles are due in some respect to both his future career and to his future wife.’ He went on to explain that Mr Ogilvy had been receiving anonymous letters, insinuating that his fiancée was an evil woman, a seductress, a harlot. ‘Nothing could be farther from the truth,’ Dr Lanark avowed. ‘I have met the young lady myself and she is in every respect a paragon of feminine virtue. Indeed a more delightful and innocent young lady could scarcely be imagined.’
As Mr Ogilvy was intending to stand for Parliament, I suggested that the letters were perhaps an attempt at blackmail.
‘That is how I, too, interpreted them,’ my employer replied.
‘Then Mr Ogilvy wishes us to discover the scoundrel who is sending him these letters?’
‘I wish that were the case, Thwaite, but no.’
‘Then what, Dr Lanark?’
‘I am afraid that Gerard Ogilvy came here today to ask me to investigate his fiancée. By some horrible twist of jealousy in his mind, to which the most honourable of men are, unhappily, susceptible, he has come to, if not exactly believe these accusations, at least not to be able to dismiss them out of hand in the manner which would be desirable. He is, in short, tortured by uncertainty. It is to this grave anxiety that the dark lines on his face can be ascribed. Mr Ogilvy has resolved to go away for one month, ostensibly to visit his dying aunt in South Africa. In his absence, he wishes us to have Miss Vierge watched, day and night, so that he may, upon his return, know for certain one way or the other.’
‘I see.’
There was a pause while Dr Lanark relit his pipe. He breathed in and the office grew smoky with the familiar and agreeable fumes of his tobacco. I looked at my employer’s face; he appeared to be deep in thought, so I turned my attention back to the report on my desk. It was perhaps a few minutes later that he spoke again. When he did so, his voice had lost its vague and melancholy tone. He was his more customary self: calm, assured, dynamic. ‘Thwaite,’ he said, ‘I have decided that you shall take charge of this case. It is a delicate matter, and calls for someone of the greatest sensitivity. My other detectives, hardened by their experiences on the streets, might lack the necessary subtlety. I believe you will do a good job. You will report daily to me, of course, but I have the utmost faith in your abilities.’
‘Thank you, Dr Lanark,’ I said proudly, endeavouring to maintain a calm visage. ‘I won’t let you down.’
I began my new assignment early the next morning. At five o’clock, long before first light, I left my room in Kings Cross and walked through silent streets to the address in Mayfair where Miss Vierge kept her apartment. I arrived ten minutes early and relieved the night detective, whom I discovered smoking a cigarette in the doorway of an abandoned house on the other side of the road. He was the first of Lanark’s detectives that I had met, though I had occasionally seen some using the back stairs to the office. Given my ambitions at this time, and the excitement I felt at being inducted into the profession, it is perhaps not surprising that this meeting should have formed such a strong impression in my mind. Yet it was not entirely due to the circumstances; and indeed this young man was to play a much greater part in the story of my life than I could possibly have foreseen at the time.
Ivan Dawes - for that was the detective’s name - was not at all the kind of man I had been expecting. In place of the slinking, silent, dark-faced chameleon of my imagination, here was a boy - barely older than me - who wore dandyish clothes, had fair hair that poured in loose curls down to his shoulders, a thin, almost girlish face with red, lascivious lips, and eyes so lively that I immediately suspected him of what would have been a serious character flaw for a man in his line of work: a lack of discretion. I confess that Ivan made me feel awkward, shy, provincial in those few brief moments when we spoke to each other in the alleyway. I don’t remember precisely what he said that morning, but I remember the tone (jocular, lightly demeaning) in which he referred to ‘the target’, and I remember the disapproval this roused in me. I also remember not trusting his apparent friendliness; I feared that, behind his open smile, he was laughing at my gaucheness.
I had the day shift: from six in the morning till seven in the evening. Though two hours longer than the night shift, this was generally considered the easier option because the nights tended to be either achingly dull and cold, or extremely dangerous. Naturally I dreamed of taking over the night shift, though perhaps not with this particular target; Ivan informed me that ‘her ladyship’ had extinguished her bedroom light at
midnight and that nothing at all had occurred since then. Such cases were referred to either as ‘sleepers’ or ‘deaduns’, depending on whether the target’s behaviour changed at a later time; thus, an apparent deadun could sometimes turn out to be a sleeper. ‘I’m afraid she’s a deadun,’ Ivan sighed, ‘though it must be said that she makes a very pretty corpse. I wouldn’t have minded keeping a watch on her from in between the bedsheets.’
I tried not to think of what Ivan had said, after he left me in the doorway, but my mind defiantly conjured images of her ladyship’s beauty while I waited for some movement in the doorway of number 21 Luff Street. I was desperately naïve for a man of my age, still a virgin, and with almost no amorous experience at all. I was also - and this is not unrelated to my bizarre and unnatural innocence - dangerously romantic. Even so, no age of rosy imaginings could have prepared me for the radiant reality of Angelina Vierge.
I have often, in the months that followed, gone over this moment in my mind again, trying to recall at what precise angle and time of day I first laid eyes on her; but it is useless; my memories of that first day are too confused for any single image to stand out from the bright tumult. What I do know is that she was dressed in white, quite simply, as was her style, and that from the moment she appeared in my vision, I was lost. The earth beneath my feet fell away and I felt that swirling, tumbling, churning sensation that I still feel, even now, at the remembrance of her face or her voice or her name.
For the whole of that long day I followed her around London, from boutique to restaurant to a female friend’s apartment. She travelled by private cab, and I hailed hansoms as and when I required them. I had processed enough expenses forms to know the protocol. I was dressed inconspicuously in a dark and fairly worn suit, black overcoat and top hat; I carried a notebook, a pen-knife and a pencil in one coat pocket, a small revolver in the other, but was otherwise unburdened. I thought I did a good job of keeping myself concealed, though in truth, when the target is utterly innocent of the possibility that she is being followed, this is not in itself a difficult task. In my new-boy’s fear of letting her give me the slip, however, I was somewhat over-vigilant. For instance, the sensible thing would have been to eat lunch when Miss Vierge herself did - with two female companions in an excellent French restaurant called Le Rendez-vous - but I was so nervous that I simply stood on the opposite street corner and watched the door of the restaurant, with the consequence that, by three o’clock, I was almost fainting with thirst and hunger.