“Not really. This guy seems reasonably well educated. Not that that means a lot, I know. Bizarre forms of spelling and grammar hardly represent a greater threat than correct grammar—except to literacy. There are some unusual capitalizations—nouns like ‘Machines,’ ‘Power’ and ‘Crazy.’”
“Germans capitalize their nouns, don’t they?” said Maria.
“Uh-huh. But this seems more like some sort of mental tic. It makes the concepts sound Big, and it goes with his gushing, flowery prose style.”
“What about the handwriting?” Kelly Norris asked. She had left her own hutch and was now standing beside Maria, interested, hand resting lightly on the divider. A tall, big-boned woman with a mass of curly gray hair and spots of color high on her cheeks, Kelly had been the first woman on the team. She was wearing threadbare black cords and a baggy white cardigan over a red blouse. Kelly always did dress casually.
“It was done on a laser printer,” said Arvo. “That means he either owns a computer set-up or he works in a place where he can get access to one.”
“Where did he send the letters?” Maria asked.
“Home address. She thought she kept it a pretty closely guarded secret.”
Kelly and Maria laughed. “Her and everyone else.”
“Yeah. Well, maybe we can do a bit of checking around with the agencies and private detectives who sell that sort of information. See if anyone’s bought Sarah Broughton’s address recently.”
“Good luck,” said Maria. “In my experience, those guys give you dick.”
“True enough. Still worth a shot.”
“Any occult stuff?” Kelly asked.
“No,” said Arvo. Often, the writers insisted that the victim should be initiated as a Dawn Goddess of the Order of the Golden Monkey Foreskins, or something. Arvo had seen plenty of those, and they always gave him the same feeling: somewhere between the creeps and the desire to laugh out loud.
“Apart from the romantic stuff,” he went on, “there are a few disturbing references to hacking away the corrupt flesh. And a bit about biting through her nipple and luxuriating in the flow of blood and milk.”
“Sick-o,” said Kelly.
Maria put her finger in her mouth and mimicked barfing.
Even Eric looked up from the file he was working on and wrinkled his nose.
“The big three,” Arvo said. “Sex, death and Mother. All in one sentence. All very mysterious.” But he stopped himself from reading too much into the images. After all, he wasn’t a psychiatrist; he only had a degree in Communications, that catch-all for people who didn’t really know what they wanted to do when they were between eighteen and twenty-one. And the TMU didn’t demand special prerequisite training from its members, only that they be good detectives. Keen intuition, strong research abilities and general social skills were the essentials.
He shook his head. “And Sarah Broughton’s a puzzle, too. I think she knows more than she’s telling.”
Maria raised her black eyebrows. “Better watch yourself, Arvo,” she said. “I’ve never known a man who wasn’t a sucker for an enigmatic woman.” She nudged Kelly and they both laughed. Eric kept his head down, shiny bald pate toward them.
“Package for Detective Arvo Hughes!”
Arvo raised his hand and the patrolman walked right up to his hutch and handed over a thick manila envelope. He signed for it, stuck his thumb under the flap and ripped it open.
Crime-scene pictures spilled out over his messy desk. Jesus, he thought, as he looked at the stark black-and-white images and the garish color Polaroids, someone had certainly done a number on John Heimar.
There were pictures of the general area and of the body half buried, in situ, with the bloody stump of an arm lying beside it, where, Arvo assumed, Sarah Broughton must have dropped it. Then there were photos of the various body parts as they were unearthed and pieced together on a canvas sheet on the beach. Photo after photo showed the reconstruction of a body: first the arm, then the arm and head, then an arm, a leg and the head, and so on.
There was very little blood; clearly most of it had been spilled somewhere else and the rest had drained into the sand. The rough edges of flesh where the head and legs had been severed gaped like cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop.
Arvo became aware of Maria’s perfume and felt her warm breath on his neck as she came around and leaned over him. “My God,” he heard her mutter. “This is what your actress found?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The poor woman.”
But Arvo wasn’t looking at the images of violent death any longer. Something in one of the early black-and-whites had caught his eye.
The photograph had been taken from the landward side of the body, and judging by the angle, the photographer had probably knelt to take it. The time must have been soon after sunrise, because the sun was shining over the hills in the east and casting fairly long shadows.
Just beyond the body, where the sand was getting wet from the tide, Arvo thought he could make out a faint indentation, as if something had been drawn there, then mostly washed away. He could only see it because of the sun’s angle, and even then it was no more than an indistinct outline. It could have been merely a trick of the light and water, he thought, but it looked exactly like a heart shape.
14
AS SOON AS SARAH GOT TO THE BOTTOM OF THE stairs and bent to give her father a kiss on his rough cheek, Cathy and Jason dashed through from the front room and surrounded her, jumping up and down. She had hardly registered the sour smell of his breath before the kids had dragged her away to tell them all about the television series and what it was like living with all the stars in Hollywood. What were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme really like?
After she had whetted their appetites with a few harmless exaggerations, magically transforming the humble beach house into something approaching the Hearst castle, she went to look for Paula and found her in the kitchen, warm in the heat of the gas oven.
“It’s nowt special,” Paula said, by way of a warning. “Just a chicken-and-leek casserole, boiled potatoes and a tin of peas. Not what you’re used to over there, I expect.”
“It’s fine, really,” said Sarah, smiling to herself. In a way it was a relief not to have to make her way politely through yet another shredded romaine and sweet onion salad with chèvre and roasted chestnuts, or duck and spinach ravioli with thymed tomatoes. “Can I help?”
Paula gestured with a wooden spoon. “You can peel those spuds, if you like.”
Put firmly in her place, Sarah began to peel the potatoes. “Dad looks worse than I expected,” she said.
Paula gave a harsh laugh. “Well, he’s not getting any better, that’s for certain. But there’s good days and bad. Today’s fair to middling.” She put down her wooden spoon and turned to face Sarah, tiredness and resignation showing in the lines around her eyes and the dark bags beneath them. “It’s the nights that are the worst,” she said. “He has trouble breathing when he lies down sometimes. The doctor says it’s normal, given his condition, but that doesn’t help a lot, does it? The thing is, Sal, he gets so frightened when it happens. He thinks his time’s come. His heart beats so fast and loud I’ll swear they can almost hear it in the next street. And he gets confused, he doesn’t know where he is or who I am. It passes, like, but it gets me worried. I hate to see him like that. And him such a vigorous man in his prime.”
She looked away, eyes burning, then shot Sarah a sly, sideways glance before casting her eyes down. “He calls me by your name sometimes, too, you know. ‘Sal,’ he says. ‘Sal, I’ve got to go now.’” She sniffed and went back to stirring the sauce. “Hurry up with those spuds, will you, or this bloody casserole will be well past its sell-by date.”
“It smells good,” said Sarah, flushed and tingling with what Paula had just told her. Her father had called her name—Sal—in his confusion. Perhaps he didn’t hate her, after all. She ran cold water into the pan of peeled potatoes and put
it on the burner.
“Thanks,” said Paula. “You can set the table now, if you like.”
Sarah did so, and before long they all sat down to dinner. Cathy and Jason wanted to go in the front room and watch television while they ate from their laps, but Paula said no, they watched too much of the idiot-box as it was. She looked at Sarah when she said “idiot-box” and Sarah didn’t miss the dig. But that was Paula all over; she had given too much away in an unguarded moment, and now she had to go on the offensive.
The children sulked for about thirty seconds, then they started humming the theme music of Good Cop, Bad Cop. Paula told them to shut up. Sarah laughed. Her father continued to pick at his food in silence, leaving most of it. Paula shot Sarah a long-suffering glance, as if to say, “See, he’s even off his food now. What am I to do? How can I cope with all this?”
It was hot in the dining room and Sarah felt a bead or two of sweat trickle down the groove of her spine. Had Paula turned up the heat for her benefit? It would be just like her to do that, and then complain about the bill. What little conversation they had over the meal was halting and banal, yet fraught with the tension of the unsaid, the unexpressed. She was beginning to feel like a character in a Pinter play.
As she ate, she began to think that there might be some kind of home or special clinic where her father could go and be well cared for. God knew, she could afford it. But she knew without asking that any such suggestion would be met with extreme resistance. Where she came from, you looked after your own.
After a Marks and Spencer’s apple pie with custard, which Sarah declined, and some general chat about what a lousy summer it had been, Paula sent the children off to bed and announced that she had to go to work. Sarah did the washing-up alone, with only the sound of the wind whistling around the kitchen window for company.
When she had finished, she returned to the dining room and saw that her father was still in the same position at the table. He had one of his stamp albums open in front of him and was turning the stiff pages slowly.
Sarah could only stand in the doorway and gaze, held frozen by the emotion of a memory that leapt unbidden into her mind. She must have been five or six, at the cramped old pit house in Barnsley, and for the first time her father beckoned her over after tea to come look at his stamps. Even then he had spent hours at the table just looking at them, chain-smoking Woodbines and sometimes drinking a bottle of beer.
Sarah could remember the smells as if they were yesterday: the acrid cigarette smoke, the malt and hops of the beer, the lingering odor of dripping, bacon or kippers. And she had stood beside him—he with his arm loosely around her shoulders—and looked into what she could only describe as windows into bright new worlds. Small windows with serrated edges, or tiny screens onto which colorful images were projected. None of the stamps were very valuable, she thought, but the bright colors, the proud heads of monarchs, exotic birds, other animals and majestic ships and planes that decorated them enthralled her.
And now here he was, in a different, much larger house with any number of rooms to choose from, in the same position at the dinner table, poring over his collection. From where she stood, Sarah could see the flashes of color.
In her mind, she could hear the memory of his voice as he told her the stories of the stamps, of how “Suomi” meant Finland and “Deutschland” meant Germany, who they had fought in the war, of how far away and how hot were the places like Gold Coast, British Guyana and Mauritius, and how the brightly colored birds with the long feather tails, the macaws and birds of paradise, depicted on the stamps, really did live in those places. One day, she had vowed then, she would see them. Her eyes burned with tears as she watched him laboring to breathe over the images.
Her father looked up and frowned. “What’s up, lass?”
Sarah wiped her forearm over her eyes. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m fine.” She grasped the back of a chair and steadied herself. “Still a bit tired. Must be the flight.”
“Like a drop of brandy?”
“No, no. I’m all right, really, Dad. Don’t bother.” She rubbed her eyes again, this time with the backs of her hands.
He jerked his head. “It’s in that cabinet over there. I wouldn’t mind one myself.”
When she was a child, there had always been “medicinal’ brandy in the house, and the one time Sarah had been given a drink, after the shock of falling off her bike and spraining her wrist, she had hated it. She had tried it since, however, and didn’t mind the taste too much now.
She found the brandy and two glasses. She poured generous measures and put one in front of her father, then sat down with her own. He looked at his glass, smiled and said, “Hand slipped, did it?” then took a sip.
An awkward silence followed. Sarah didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to ask him about his emphysema—no more, she imagined, than he wanted to talk about it. Finally, her father broke the silence: “Doing all right, then, are you, lass?”
“Yes.” Sarah cradled her glass in both hands and looked into the dark amber liquid. “Yes, I’m doing fine.”
“Being ill like this . . .” He paused. “It changes you. Puts things in perspective. Know what I mean?”
Sarah nodded. She didn’t know what to say. Had he forgiven her?
“Aye,” he said. “Well . . .” Then he shifted in his wheelchair, probably from embarrassment. As Sarah knew too well, he wasn’t a man given to easy expression of his feelings. Well, no men were, really, but some were better than others.
“So what’s Tinseltown like?” he asked.
“I . . . I don’t really . . .” Sarah felt stuck for words. She had almost said she didn’t live there, but of course she did. What on earth could she be thinking of? “It’s all right, I suppose,” she went on. “It’s warm most of the time. I miss the change of seasons. The snowdrops and daffodils in spring, the leaves changing and falling in autumn. I mean, I don’t mind living there, but it’s so . . .”
Lonely, she almost said, but she didn’t want to expose herself, certainly not to her father. Let’s bury Daddy in the sand! She shivered. Besides, isolation was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Seclusion, no complications. And the beach house was where she had begun to find herself, begun the reconstruction of Sally Bolton. Instead, she simply said, “Impermanent.”
“You’re not planning on staying there?” her father asked.
Sarah shrugged. That wasn’t what she meant at all, but she didn’t think she could explain it to him.
“Do you still live by yourself?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it dangerous? We see things on the news. Muggings, gangs, riots and fires and suchlike.”
Sarah shrugged. “I suppose so. I’m working at the studio a lot. It’s safe there. They’ve got very good security. And it’s very quiet where I live. By the sea, like this.” Except for the maniac on the hill watching me through binoculars, she wanted to add. “You should come and visit,” she said, not realizing until she had spoken that he probably couldn’t travel very easily.
His lips formed a smile that his eyes didn’t echo. “I doubt I could survive that there smog,” he said.
Sarah laughed. “Oh, come on. You’d probably be better off than the rest of us, what with your oxygen and all. Besides, it’s not so bad these days. There’s a lot of emission controls.”
He grinned, showing crooked black and yellow teeth. “Aye, who knows? Maybe one day. I’d like to see all them stars on the pavement there before I die. Ronald Colman. Greta Garbo. Charlie Chaplin. Jimmy Stewart. I’ve always wanted to see those.”
Sarah was surprised. “I’ll take you,” she said. “I’ll show you them. I didn’t even know you liked movies.”
He shrugged. “Used to go to t’pictures a lot when I was a young lad. Before I met your mother and went down t’pit. Never had time for owt like that when you were a kid, though. I were always on some bloody awkward shift or another. That or sleeping.” He paused and took severa
l deep breaths of oxygen before going on. “And there weren’t no videos and the like back then. It’s a lot easier now. I can’t get out and about much these days so I watch at home. Paula’s a good lass, she goes and fetches them for me. Old ones mostly. Black-and-white. They’re still the best. You can keep your sex and violence.” He looked directly at Sarah as he spoke, and she blushed and turned away, remembering the row they had after he’d seen her do a nude scene in a Channel Four film. The beginning of the end. “Nay,” he went on, “I hadn’t time for t’pictures back then, had I? Your mother, though . . . now that were another matter.”
They fell silent for a moment, Sarah contemplating the times when her mother took her to the pictures. More stimulus for the budding actress. All kinds of memories came rushing back. She remembered the first film she had ever seen, when she was five or six—Walt Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians—and how scared she had been of Cruella De Ville.
When she next looked at her father, his eyes were closed and his chin rested on his chest. At first, she thought something terrible had happened to him, but she could still hear his struggle for breath and the slow hiss of oxygen.
Slowly, Sarah crept upstairs and picked up the envelope. She had been in two minds about it all evening: half afraid of opening it and morbidly curious about the contents. Now, while her father and the children slept, while Paula was at work, she opened it and slipped out the two pages. Then she read the words with mounting horror:
My Darling Little Star,
Oh my Love, if only everyone could see what I see. Patterns of the most delicate intricacy. Patterns of Spirit stripped of Flesh and Muscle. Sometimes I see Fountains of bright Blood gushing across a hundred television screens at once. Sometimes I hear you speak to me over the Electromagnetic Waves, telling me what I must do to prove my Love.
Don’t you know who I am, my Little Star? You are the Detective now. Look into your past and find me. I am there, the dark Shape in the Shadows of your Memory. Find me, my love. Speak to me. Love me. Let me free you. Tell me you Know. I will rescue you. I will win you back from Them and we will look into each other’s eyes over the candlelight and hold hands beyond the Flesh for centuries through the Mirrors of the Sea where none can live but us.
No Cure for Love Page 9