No Cure for Love

by Peter Robinson

  “How long have you been living here?” he asked.

  “About fifteen months. Since a year last September, to be exact.”

  “Before that?”

  She shrugged. “I lived in London. I travelled . . .”

  “And you came over here to work on this series?”

  “No. That came later.”

  “How much later?”

  She looked at Stuart. “Let me see,” she said. “They started casting last January.”

  “Did you apply?”

  “No. I was staying with an old friend from England, Ellie Huysman. She used to be Stuart’s assistant here. When the part came up, she thought of me.”

  “When did you change your name?”

  “March.”

  “Any idea who might be sending the letters?”

  “Not the slightest.”

  “Ex-boyfriends?”

  She reddened a little but kept her composure. “There haven’t been very many.”

  “Who was the last?”

  “It’s of no relevance. He’s dead.”

  “How did he die? When?”

  Sarah paused for a moment. Arvo noticed a tic at the left side of her jaw. “I told you it’s irrelevant, but if you must know, he died of a drug overdose. Late last year.”

  “Were you with him at the time?”

  “No, we’d split up.”

  “What about the one before that?”

  “The only serious one was Justin. Justin Mercer. I lived with him for five years in London, but that was a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Ten years. He was older. An actor. I was new in the business. It started as an affair, then he left his wife . . .” She shrugged. “I can’t very well see Justin pursuing me this way. He dumped me for a younger model just after my thirtieth birthday.”

  “I didn’t see his address in your book. Mercer does begin with an “M.” Have you still got it?”

  “No. We haven’t stayed in touch. You should be able to find out easily enough, though. He’s quite famous.”

  “He still lives in England?”

  “As far as I know, he does.”

  “What about while you’ve been here, in Los Angeles.”

  She shook her head. “There’s been no one.”

  “Anyone who might like to have been?”

  That small smile came to her lips again, just revealing the overlapping teeth. “Probably a few,” she said. “But nobody who’s been really troublesome.”

  “What about dates, casual affairs?”

  “You mean one-night stands?”

  “If you like.”

  “I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  One of the director’s assistants walked in and said something about getting the show on the road again. Technicians started ambling among the snaking cables at the edges of the phony precinct house.

  “Okay,” Arvo said to him. “Almost finished.” Then heturned to Sarah again. She sat down slowly. “Are you sureyou can’t think of anyone who might be doing this?”

  “No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, think about it, will you? And think about “Little Star.” You might remember something important. If the writer did know you, it could help us find him.”

  “I’ll try. Is that all?”

  “For now.” Arvo stood up and handed her his card. “And get in touch immediately if anything else happens, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “I understand you’re leaving the country tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Between now and then, I suggest you take extra security measures, just in case. Make sure everything’s locked up properly, avoid walking around alone, that sort of thing. Common sense stuff.”

  “I will,” she said.

  Outside the soundstage, Stuart picked up two skewers from the barbecue and offered Arvo one. He accepted. The shrimp was delicious, marinated in some sort of Thai sauce, spicy and sweet at the same time.

  “What do you think?” Stuart asked as they walked back to the administration block.

  “I don’t know,” said Arvo. “But I think you’re right. I got the feeling that she’s either holding something back or she really can’t remember. Either way, “Little Star” means something to her.”

  “Why would she hold anything back?”

  “That’s one of the things that puzzles me. But if she’s not holding back, then why can’t she remember? Whatever the reason, it’s worth opening a file.” He popped the last shrimp in his mouth, said goodbye to Stuart and headed for his car.

  8

  THE BOULEVARD WAS A KALEIDOSCOPE OF BROKEN color, shards of green, orange, red and blue neon fragmenting through his windshield as he cruised, looking for the right place.

  He stopped at a red light. His chest felt tight and his breath was coming in sharp, rapid gasps. Hanging from the rearview mirror was his talisman, a small framed icon of Sarah/Sally. She was naked from the waist up, her small breasts firm and rounded, thrust forward like the figurehead of a ship. And she was smiling at him.

  The light changed and the car behind him honked its horn. A wave of anger swept through him and for a moment he felt like . . . but no. He knew he had to keep control; he mustn’t give in to blind rage. This was for Sally.

  Slowly, he edged down the throbbing Boulevard. From store windows, mannequins followed him with their gaze; crowds wandered from bar to bar, oblivious to him. But that would soon change.

  Finally, he found the stretch he had been looking for. A place where the pickings would be easy. It didn’t matter who the victim was, only what. Like a cat, he thought. Does a cat really care which bird it captures? Doesn’t one pigeon look just like another?

  He pulled over and parked by the curb, engine still ticking over, and wound down the window.

  Maybe it was okay to be a little nervous. It gave him an edge; it honed his vision. The lights had never looked so sharp; they felt like knifepoints piercing his eyeballs. He knew that he would never see anything as clearly as what he was to do tonight. And it was all for her. He gazed proudly at his icon.

  A figure separated itself from a small group standing outside a minimart and strutted toward him. He held his breath and gripped the wheel tightly. His pigeon.

  9

  SARAH WOKE WITH A START AT FOUR-FIFTEEN IN the morning. At first she felt confused, not sure what had woken her. For a while she just lay there, hardly daring to breathe, frightened that there was someone in the house. But it was probably just a siren or a squeal of brakes on the Coast Highway. As the policeman had suggested, she had locked up everything securely, including the outside gate to the beach. She lay still and listened for ten minutes. Nothing. All she could hear was the ceaseless rolling of the waves and her own heart beating too loud and too fast.

  When she was certain she could hear no one else in the house, she got out of bed and walked over to the sliding glass doors that led to the second-level deck. She left the light off, just in case there was anyone watching her, and slid the doors open slowly and quietly. If he was out there somewhere, she didn’t want him to know that she had heard him.

  But she could see nothing out there, either, only the ocean rippling and rolling under its pale blanket of moonlight. She thought she saw something further up the beach, the sudden movement of a flashlight, perhaps, but it was gone before she could be certain.

  She wondered if she should phone the police, but decided they would think she was getting paranoid. After all, she had only received three weird letters. As Stuart said, there was nothing special about that in Hollywood.

  Still a little nervous, she knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. She was also thirsty from the red wine she’d had with Jack at dinner that night, and Italian food always gave her heartburn. First, she padded to the bathroom, where she drank a large glass of water and took a couple of Maalox tablets. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen and put water and ground beans in the coffeemake
r.

  She would have to watch the drinking, she admonished herself, feeling the weight of a mild headache as she moved. For over a year now she had hardly touched a drop; even at Jack’s party she had held on to one rum and Coke for the entire evening. But last night at dinner, she had drunk four glasses of red wine and laughed too loudly. Bad signs.

  It was her habit most mornings to get up around dawn. First she would make coffee, then, while it was brewing, she would go for a run. It was too early yet, though. She liked to wait until she could sense the first light before she set off.

  She put on her tracksuit, drank coffee, ate toast, did a little housework and read J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions for a while. It was the third time she had read the book, and it always made her feel homesick. Then, when she felt the light growing outside, she stood up and stretched. After her warm-up exercises, she set off. Originally a chore, the morning run had soon become compulsion, and now it was a pleasure.

  She liked to run in the damp sand by the shore and feel the foam wet her feet. As she ran, she would watch the sun coming up behind the mountains, the light growing in the water, and breathe the ozone that the crashing surf seemed to exhale into the atmosphere.

  This morning, as she ran, her reading of The Good Companions made her start thinking about her own childhood and how she began playing parts to escape the grime and the coal dust, the suffocating aura of defeat, poverty and broken dreams all around her. She remembered the time she organized a couple of her friends and, with sheets borrowed from the washing-line, they improvised the story of Ruth among the alien corn that they had learned in Sunday school the previous week.

  Sarah’s mother had been livid. Not only had her daughter been participating in the trivialization of a Bible story, she had also dirtied freshly washed sheets. In her mother’s mind, Methodism and theater weren’t as close as cleanliness and godliness.

  Sarah hadn’t run more than a quarter of a mile when she noticed something about a hundred yards ahead of her in the sand. It was an odd, humped shape she couldn’t quite make out. Probably driftwood.

  It had been an odd relationship, she thought, the one she had had with her mother. Alice Bolton’s religion had been deeply enough ingrained to make her theologically opposed to most forms of human artistic endeavor, even if they were dedicated to the praise of God, yet she had been proud of her daughter. More so than her father. If only—

  Sarah stopped dead in her tracks as another childhood memory thudded into her mind with the force of a hammer blow.

  Let’s bury Daddy in the sand.

  It was a game they used to play on seaside holidays in Blackpool, on the rare warm days. She and her older sister, Paula, would dig a hole in the sand and Daddy would lie down in it, then they would cover him with sand and pat it down. In the end, only his head would be showing. He would stay there for a while, then all of a sudden he would jump up and chase them, as they giggled and screamed, into the cold, gray Irish Sea.

  The figure that lay in front of her now hadn’t been quite so well buried. The hands and forearms stuck out, as did the feet. The face was above the surface, but it was covered with a light dusting of sand, as if blown there by the breeze, and she couldn’t make out the features. She couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.

  Sarah stood and stared, hands on her knees, panting for breath. She didn’t know what to do. In panic, she looked around but there was no one in sight. There never was at this time. Only the gulls screeching and squealing overhead in the pale morning light. Was the person dead? She thought so. Should she run back to the house and phone an ambulance? Maybe she should make sure first?

  Gingerly, she leaned forward and grasped one of the hands. She braced herself for the weight, but as soon as she exerted the slightest pressure, she fell back on the sand.

  Then she saw it. In her hand, she held a human arm, severed just above the elbow, where she could see the dark, clotted blood and tissue matted with sand. She dropped it and got to her feet. Blood roared and waves pounded in her ears.

  Just before she turned away to run back to the house, she saw something else, something that made her blood freeze.

  The image looked as if it had been drawn in the sand with a sharp stick. It showed a heart pierced by an arrow, like the ones teenage lovers used to carve into trees or chalk on walls. Inside the heart was her name: Sally.

  Sarah put her hand to her mouth and staggered back a few paces before turning to run back to the house.

  PART TWO

  10

  JUDGING BY THE EXPRESSIONS OF DELIGHT AND surprise when the captain announced that it was a clear and sunny day in Manchester, with a temperature of fifty degrees, Californians had just as many illusions about the English weather as the Brits had about theirs. Either that or global warming was messing everything up. No one took off their jackets, though; fifty was still too cold for an Angeleno in December.

  As Sarah had a British passport, she avoided the long line at immigration. Her one large suitcase, packed with Christmas presents, arrived quickly at the carousel, and though one of the officers gave her a second glance when she walked through the “Nothing to Declare’ exit, it wasn’t because he thought she was smuggling something in.

  The airport was noisy with the clamor of waiting relatives. Sarah’s plane had arrived at the same time as a Jamaican flight, which explained the colorful costumes and the steel band. Here to greet a visiting dignitary or a sports team, she guessed.

  She stood by the barrier holding on to her pushcart and scanned the crowd for Paula. There she was, waving both arms in the air behind a group of Indian women in colorful saris.

  Sarah pushed forward, muttering excuse-mes as she went. The arrivals concourse was so crowded that it was impossible to get through without bumping into people. She almost ran over a small child and earned a dirty look for catching an elderly woman a glancing blow on the shin before she reached Paula. They hugged briefly, then Paula pushed Sarah back to arm’s-length and examined her.

  “Let’s have a look at you, then, our Sal.”

  The broad Yorkshire accent came as a shock to Sarah, though she didn’t know why it should. She had spoken that way herself once, but now it sounded awkward and primitive to her, the mark of a certain class. She felt embarrassed for thinking such thoughts and cursed the English class system for always leaving its mark, no matter what you achieved. Had she been born to the upper classes and bred for success, Sarah thought bitterly, she wouldn’t always be so consumed by self-doubt and lack of confidence, wouldn’t always feel the bubble was about to burst.

  “Well,” said Paula, “I must say it’s a big improvement on the last time.”

  “What is?”

  “Don’t you remember? The make-up, the frizzy hair, the leather?”

  Sarah laughed. “Oh. Yes, of course.” She didn’t remember, though, which was hardly surprising given the condition she had been in during her last visit home. That was before California, before the U.S. tour with Gary and his band, but it wasn’t before the drugs and the drinking; though she hadn’t recognized it immediately, the craziness had already begun. She didn’t remember anything very clearly about that period of her life. Nor did she wish to.

  This time she was wearing stonewashed jeans and a red sweatshirt, carrying her quilted down coat of many colors over her arm, and her blond hair was trimmed neat and short. She also wore no makeup, a real treat after having the stuff plastered on every day at the studio.

  “Mind you,” Paula went on. “You could do with putting a bit of meat on your bones. Have you been slimming and going to one of them health club places like they do in Hollywood?”

  Sarah laughed. “I run every morning on the beach, but that’s about all.” In fact, only yesterday morning I stumbled across a dismembered body, she almost added, but stopped herself in time. No point getting into that with Paula. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s illegal to sell fatty foods in California.”

  “Is it?”
<
br />   “Only kidding. Though sometimes you’d think so.”

  “Well, you looked a bit better padded last time I saw you on television. How long ago did you make that programme?”

  “Not long. Television puts at least ten pounds on you, didn’t you know that?”

  “How would I? I’ve never been on telly. I’m not the star in the family.”

  “I just thought people knew, that’s all,” Sarah said. “Anyway, I hope I don’t look that fat on the series.”

  “I didn’t say fat did I? Just a bit better padded.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Anyway, I suppose you look healthy enough,” Paula went on. “Though for the life of me, I can’t see where you’re hiding your tan.”

  “Which way?”

  Paula pointed and Sarah started pushing the cart through the throng. “I don’t tan well,” she said. “I never did. You know that. The sun just burns me.” Besides, she might have added, the studio prefers my “porcelain’ complexion; they say it goes with the plummy Brit accent.

  “Well, pardon me for mentioning it.”

  Sarah laughed. Same old Paula, prickly as a cactus, quick to take offense when none was intended.

  Finally, they arrived at the car park and found the red Nissan.

  “Unless you’ve learned to drive since you were last here, love,” Paula said, “I’d try the other side.”

  Sarah blushed. “Sorry.” She’d gone automatically to the driver’s side. She got in the correct side and fastened her seat belt. “How was the drive over?” she asked.

  Paula lit a cigarette and breathed a sigh of relief. “Not bad. Roadworks near Barton bridge and an accident just past Huddersfield, but other than that . . .” She negotiated her way out of the car park, refusing Sarah’s offer of money to pay the man in the booth, and headed for the motorway. “It’s a bloody maze round here,” she muttered.

  The car felt cramped and tinny to Sarah after Stuart’s gigantic hunk of Detroit steel. She wriggled around in the seat to get comfortable, but still the roof was too near to her head and the windshield too close to her face. Cars made her more nervous than planes, which was one reason why she had never learned to drive. The smoke made her cough.