No Cure for Love

by Peter Robinson

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard.”

  Sarah was suddenly conscious of the wind screaming outside, like some outcast creature in despair trying to get in. “But that’s ridiculous,” she said. “He hates me. Maybe not hates, but . . . Oh, he tolerates me, for appearance’s sake. After all, I am family. He’s polite. But he’s never forgiven me for not being what he wanted me to be, for that bloody sex scene, for Gary, the drugs, for moving to LA—”

  “You stupid cow, can’t you see it? He adores you. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve embarrassed him or let him down, he still thinks the sun shines out of your arse.”

  “But—”

  “No, let me finish.” Paula sat forward and rested her hands on her knees. “It’s about time you heard a few home truths, little Miss High and Mighty. I’m not saying he puts no value on me, of course he does. I think he respects me. He certainly appreciates how I take care of him. He’s grateful. But he loves you. Can’t you see the difference?”

  Sarah shook her head. “No.”

  “Then you’re a fool. When you made those dirty films and then took off with that drug addict Gary Knox, you broke Dad’s heart. He thought he’d lost you forever. He’s a proud man and he’s used to being obeyed, so of course he cut you off. What would you expect of him? But I know what he really felt. Remember, I’ve lived with him all this time, heard him calling me by your name when he’s half asleep and afraid of dying, seen him looking at the phone, willing it to ring, waiting for the postman. I’ve seen the pride, the way his face lights up when he sees you walk on the screen.”

  “But you said he didn’t watch the series. He said—”

  “Of course he watches it. Every bloody Tuesday without fail. And if anything ever comes up to stop him, I have to tape it for him. Oh, Sal, I might have done all the right things in my life, even if they didn’t all work out. And there’s the kids, too, of course. Dad adores the kids. But you’re the one he loves most. You’re the one who took on the world and won. You’re the one who broke away. You’re the one with all the guts, the one who doesn’t give a damn what people think. You’re the star, the shining light. You’re the one he’s so bloody proud of he could burst.” She shook her head. Her face was flushed and her eyes were glittering with tears. “Don’t you ever try to convince me he doesn’t prefer you, because I know he does. He always has done. And that’s something I’ve just had to learn to live with.”

  Suddenly, some of the old memories made sense to Sarah. Let’s bury Daddy in the sand, bedtime stories and, she remembered, he had taken her to the pictures when she was a little girl. She remembered him falling asleep during Fantasia at the Lyceum, and the woman next to them nudging him and telling him to stop snoring. He must have just finished a twelve-hour shift down the pit. Maybe Paula was right. But Sarah still couldn’t believe it. Struck dumb, she reached for the brandy bottle and poured another drink.

  Paula held out her glass. “I think I need another one, too. He’ll go spare when he sees that broken glass.”

  “Oh, bugger the glass. I could buy him a hundred sets of Waterford crystal if he wanted.”

  “Haven’t I got through to you? That’s not what he wants. Look at where he comes from, the kind of man he is. He’s happy with meat and two veg, a bottle of beer, a night or two a week out at the club and a roof over his head. He doesn’t want your money, or what it can buy. He wants your love. Have you forgotten how to give it? Is that what fame does to people?”

  “Perhaps I have.” Sarah took a large pull on the brandy. It was a cheap make, she noticed, and it burned all the way down. Her hand was shaking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all such a shock. I didn’t know . . .”

  “Of course you bloody didn’t. You’ve been far too busy with your career to spare a thought for family. Truth be told, you’ve always been a bit too selfish, our Sal.”

  “It’s not that. Oh, it’s true I’ve been working hard, maybe too much. But I’ve been ill, too. I fell to pieces, Paula. I came unstuck out there, thousands of miles from home. And there was no one to help me, no one I could turn to. I nearly died. I mean I nearly killed myself. I wanted to die.”

  Paula stared at her. “What? Over that worthless Gary Knox?”

  “Partly. Maybe. But it wasn’t just that, it was everything. And he wasn’t worthless, Paula. He wasn’t always worthless. He changed, that’s all. People do, you know.”

  “I heard about what happened to him. Dad said it served him right.”

  “Oh, I’d left him by then. But I lost it, Paula. Listen to what I’m saying. I just . . . lost it. Ever since then I’ve hidden myself in my work, buried my head in the sand. I’ve been too ashamed to come home and face you all.” She felt the tears burning in her eyes, felt the pent-up emotion ripping itself loose from her heart. “Why don’t you come back with me?” she said. “You. Dad. Jason and Cathy. A new life.”

  Paula laughed. “Don’t be daft. We couldn’t possibly. First off, there’s school for the kids, and Dad . . . well . . .”

  Sarah looked directly at her. “I mean it,” she said. “You can do it if you make an effort. Come over and stay with me, Paula. I’m lonely. I’m so lonely.” And she let the tears come. Her head fell to rest on Paula’s shoulder, which hardened with resistance at first, then yielded. First, Paula put an arm around her, then Sarah felt her sister’s hand stroking her hair, just like she had all those years ago. “Somebody’s trying to destroy me, Paula,” she sobbed. “Somebody’s trying to drive me insane.”

  21

  ALL DAY THE INSECTS CRAWLED OVER HIS EXPOSED flesh: face, wrists, ankles. Some of them were biting him, too, drawing blood, but he didn’t mind. It was only their nature.

  The rain came and went. He squatted in the trees at the back of the house. When you stay still for so long, he noticed, your mind moves into a very strange space indeed. Perceptions are heightened. Especially touch, smell and hearing.

  He could smell not only every individual leaf of the eucalyptus and pine trees but any number of other, small wild flowers and shrubs in the vicinity. He could smell the dirt and earth-mold beneath him, still damp after rain, and he was even aware of the changing smells of his own skin as the chemical balances inside him altered minute by minute.

  It was as if the whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation beyond the puny strip occupied by visible light had suddenly opened its secrets to him. He could smell the light slowly changing to darkness, too: like saffron and cinnamon to coal dust and ashes. He liked it.

  And he could feel every tiny insect footprint on his flesh, could hear every antenna brushing against the hairs on his wrist where the thin cotton gloves ended. He could feel the stingers, or whatever they used, slowly pricking into his skin, sucking his blood for incubation, or injecting inflammatory chemicals, and he could smell his blood as it flowed out.

  But there was no pain. The things he experienced were all part of a vast continuum of sensation in which everything could be sensed, but in which nothing felt either good or bad.

  He imagined this was what the Zen Buddhists meant when they talked about mindlessness and detachment.

  He didn’t even daydream to pass the time. Nothing but pure sensation registered in his mind. He was so exactly focused on the here and now that there was no place for memory, doubt, fear or fantasy. Deep down, he knew why he was here, knew what he had to do and who he was doing it for. He didn’t have to think about it any more; it had become a part of his nature.

  So all he had to do was wait, crouched in the woods with the insects getting in his hair and crawling down the back of his shirt collar, up his pant legs. Making tiny whistling, sucking and screaming sounds as they drew his blood.

  He heard a car in the distance and instinctively his hand tightened on the hammer he held. It was the only movement he had made in six hours, apart from blinking.

  22

  IT RAINED ON CHRISTMAS DAY IN SANTA MONICA. All day. A slow, steady drizzle, at
times indistinguishable from the fog.

  Arvo woke late, showered, brewed a pot of fresh coffee and tuned the radio to FM 93.1. He knew every oldie almost by heart. As he half listened, he thought about what Joe Westinghouse had told him the previous evening. In some ways, it came close to confirming what he had suspected: that the Heimar murder might have been carried out for Sarah Broughton’s benefit.

  Before the toxicology results, it had still been possible to believe that Heimar had simply picked up the wrong john and become the victim of a possible homophobic killer. Prostitutes, both male and female, made easy victims because they were often estranged from their families and lived far from where they grew up. They had no community beyond their own kind. If they disappeared, nobody noticed, and if another prostitute did notice, the odds were that he wasn’t going to call the cops.

  But now Arvo knew that the Heimar kid had been given so much pentobarbitol that he had been in a coma before his throat was cut, before his neck and chest were stabbed and slashed repeatedly, before his body was cut into pieces, then it looked less like an impassioned sex killing and more like a cold, deliberately planned murder.

  Joe had also checked with the coroner’s office about how the drug might have been administered. There were no fresh needle-marks, so intravenous injection was out, and it was unlikely that Heimar had been given it in a drink. Pentobarbitol tastes lousy and he would surely have noticed it, unless he had been almost paralytically drunk, which he wasn’t.

  Most likely, Joe had thought at first, the kid had been offered the pills by his killer and had simply taken them himself, for fun, or to dull the pain of what he was doing, the way a lot of street kids do.

  But the forensic pathologist who carried out the autopsy found traces of barbituric acid in Heimar’s anus and a high concentration of the drug in his rectal tissue. Which meant that Heimar or his killer had shoved the pills up his ass, probably as a prelude or a coda to anal sex. After all, straw behind the ears or not, John Heimar was a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool LA male prostitute.

  Arvo tried to push the depressing thoughts aside. There was nothing more he could do until tomorrow, after the holiday, when life got back to normal. Besides, he still couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a potential serial killer making his first tentative foray into murder and dismemberment. But if he took everything into account—the watcher with binoculars; the letters, with their promise of “proof’; the placing of the body and timing to coincide with Sarah Broughton’s regular morning run; the coldly premeditated abduction and murder of an easy victim—then it seemed more likely there was a connection.

  All morning, he had been eyeing the small package on the table by the window: his Christmas present from Nyreen. He couldn’t decide whether to open it or throw it out.

  Finally, he opened it. Under all the padding and tissue lay a small, delicate glass bowl with a rose etched on the side. Nyreen was into glass-blowing these days, and it was probably something she had made. What its purpose was, Arvo had no idea. But trust Nyreen to send him something she’d blown. He put the bowl on the mantelpiece and tried to ignore it.

  He hadn’t put up a tree this year—there seemed no point—and the few cards he had received stood on the tile mantelpiece—some from old friends in Detroit, one from his brother, Michael, in New York, one from his grandparents in Wales. His maternal grandparents had died when he was very young, before he had a chance to get to know them. When he was a boy, his mother once told him they had been murdered by Stalin after the war, but he hadn’t known what that really meant until much later.

  By noon, Arvo felt restless. He drove down to Ocean, found a parking spot without any trouble and walked along the clifftop by the palisades, with his collar turned up and his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The rain and mist felt like cool silk brushing against his face. The Christmas lights strung across Wilshire, where it ended at Ocean, looked eerie, hanging there disembodied, blurred and smudged by the wet gray light.

  All the horizons were lost in misty rain. From the top of the cliffs, he could hear the waves as they crashed on the shore below, and could just about make out the sloshing gray mass of the ocean. Gulls swooped in and out of the fog, squawking and squabbling, seemingly oblivious to both the weather and the birth of Christ. Even the traffic on the Coast Highway, way down at the bottom of the sheer cliffs, was quiet today.

  A bundle of rags stirred at the base of a palm tree and a grubby hand shot out, accompanied by a mumbled request for money. Arvo gave him a buck. Sometimes he seemed to hand over half his salary to bums. Why, he didn’t know.

  As he crossed the road to get back to his car, a police cruiser slowed to a halt beside him. He realized that, apart from the bums, he was the only person on the street. Everyone else was at home with the family eating turkey and watching It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol, and the only places open were video stores and minimarts.

  “What’s your destination, sir?” asked the young officer on the passenger side.

  Arvo flipped his shield. “Just walking.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the officer said. “Routine. Merry Christmas.”

  His partner nodded and drove off.

  “Merry Christmas,” Arvo said after the car. He supposed he did look suspicious out there alone with the bums on the street. Bums were vulnerable, like prostitutes. Sometimes people killed them for pleasure, the way people killed boys like John Heimar. The two cops—poor bastards pulling the Christmas Day shift—were only doing their jobs.

  Arvo remembered pulling Christmas shifts as a uniform cop in Detroit. Christmas Eve was pretty bad, a lot of domestic violence and shit like that. But some of the real stuff that took longer to build up exploded on Christmas Day, usually in the afternoon.

  Nobody who hasn’t done it can ever understand the feeling you get driving to work around dawn, seeing the Christmas lights all lit up on the porches and watching the bedroom lights flick on inside the houses and apartments as you drive by, maybe remembering the anticipation you used to feel when you were a kid, the excitement that this was the day you’d been waiting for, the day you were going to get that mountain bike you’d been longing for all year, or that new Sega Genesis game everyone else at school seemed to have but you. But this year, you aren’t going to be part of it at all.

  And that was the best part of the day.

  So you’d arrive feeling a little nostalgic, maybe, and the early part of the shift you’d be bored to tears, just wishing you were at home with your family like everyone else. By afternoon, though, things started to change. The calls started coming in, and by the time your shift was over you never wanted to work a holiday again.

  The first one might be a dangler, been hanging there in the middle of the living room since he woke up and found himself all alone on Christmas Day and accepted at last that there really was no future for him. By the time you get there, his neck is two feet long and his shoes are full of shit.

  Because holidays like Christmas are when really bad things happen. On Christmas Day, the husband who has been feeling depressed over being laid off for a couple of months has too much to drink, decides he doesn’t like the tie his wife bought him and shoots his children, his wife and then himself. And who cleans up? The cops and the ambulance guys.

  On Christmas Day, the wife who has been holding back her feelings about her husband’s affair ever since she found out about it in November has too many glasses of wine with the turkey, which she spent all morning preparing, and when he says he just has to go out for a while after dinner, she feels the edge of the carving knife and looks at his throat.

  On holidays like Christmas, people get together, drink too much and kill one another. Or they get depressed all alone and they kill themselves. Either way, it makes a busy time for the emergency services. You want a good argument against the family, Arvo thought, then you should spend a Christmas Eve in the police station or in the emergency ward of your local hospital.

  Arvo had no sooner got home
than the phone rang. His chest tightened when he heard Nyreen’s voice. “Merry Christmas, honey,” she said. “How did you like the present?”

  “It’s fine,” said Arvo. “You made it yourself?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t send you—”

  “Hey, it’s okay. No problem. The pleasure’s in the giving, right? Arvo, I’m not stupid. I realize I’ve hurt you and you’re probably still pissed at me and all, but you know I still care a lot about you. I hope we can be friends?”

  “I don’t know if that’s possible, Nyreen.”

  “Well, okay, maybe not right now. I understand that. Maybe it’ll take time. But what I’m saying, honey, is don’t cut me out of your life completely. Things just didn’t work out for you and me, but I still love you, you know. Okay?”

  “I don’t know. I need some time.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure. I’m fine.”

  “Are you enjoying Christmas?”

  “Yeah. Look, I’ve got to go. You know Mike Glover? He and his wife invited me over for dinner.” He had been invited, but he wasn’t going. The last thing he wanted on Christmas Day was someone else’s family being solicitous about his well-being.

  “Great. Have a good time. And give Mike and Rosie my love. Oh, and before I forget, Arvo, I’ve got some real good news.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m pregnant. Isn’t it a rush? Vern is absolutely thrilled. So am I, of course. Aren’t you just a teeny-weeny bit happy for me?”

  “Sure I’m happy for you, Nyreen. I wish you all the best. Gotta run now.”

  Arvo hung up with a lump in his throat. Pregnant. Now there was a surprise. When he and Nyreen had discussed children, she had made it quite clear that she didn’t want any, not for a few years at least. Arvo had gone along with her, though he had wanted to start a family sooner. She said she needed time to pursue her career in public relations, which she had now given up to go live with Vern in Palo Alto and blow glass. Life. Go figure.