by Jo Bannister
Like most things said in argument, it was neither wholly fair nor quite unjustified. Most of all it was unexpected. Davey flinched as from a blow. His voice was a plaint. ‘Jenny! That’s not—You can’t think that.’
‘Michael,’ she said, and a hushed power was in her voice, ‘I’ve been with you for five years. I’ve done everything you needed, everything you wanted, everything you asked of me. But don’t presume to tell me what to think.’
‘I’m not, I only meant—’ But of course that was exactly what he meant. One hand made an irritable, dismissive gesture. ‘What’s got into you, Jenny? You’re not usually this—’
She supplied the word he was groping for. ‘Sensitive?’ He nodded. Even knowing him, seeing him clearly at last, she was amazed at his selfishness. ‘Michael, you have no idea how sensitive I am. You’ve never wondered.’
He was puzzled by her rancour. He couldn’t know what she hadn’t told him, and they’d never talked about her feelings. It didn’t occur to him that in five years they should have done. Then his face cleared. ‘I know what this is about. Liz Graham, and the fact that I was prepared to ditch the crusade for the love of a woman. Well, you’ll be glad to know it isn’t going to happen. She turned me down.’
‘I know,’ Jennifer Mills said softly.
‘She acted as if the whole damn thing was a figment of my imagination. As if I was a schoolboy who’d mistaken ordinary kindness for affection. But it was more than that, Jenny,’ he went on, warming. ‘I saw her eyes. She wanted me. But she wasn’t prepared to give up for me a fraction of what I’d have given up for her. It was easier – safer – to pretend I’d made the whole thing up.’ A bitter laugh reverberated in his throat. ‘She told me—’
‘I know,’ Mills said again.
‘No, just there now,’ he explained, thinking she’d misunderstood. ‘She told me—’
‘I know what she said, Michael. I was there.’
Unseen in the growing dark, his expression slowly crumbled and fell apart. ‘At Liz’s house?’ She nodded, the movement visible though her face was not. ‘You followed me?’
‘You made a fool of yourself, Michael.’ There was a grain of something like satisfaction in her voice. ‘She never loved you. She was being polite: a nice woman being kind to a cripple. There was never any question of love. You made a mistake. Understandable, of course: you wouldn’t know love if it bit you in the leg.’
He stared at her across the gulf of darkness. ‘She also said—’
‘She was right about that, too,’ the woman said calmly. ‘That was my mistake: loving someone with the emotional capacity of a shark. You devour people, Michael. You don’t give, you only take.’ Her voice hardened. ‘This image you project: the man of God ministering to the frightened masses. It’s an illusion. Anything they get out of your meetings they bring there themselves: their own strengths, their own decency. All you supply is ego. It’s quite a turn-on, isn’t it, rows of avid upturned faces hanging on your every word. You’re a power junkie.
‘It’s a little like being a god yourself, isn’t it? People don’t go to a missionary for logic, they go for diatribe. They don’t need to be convinced: the suspension of disbelief is their willing sacrifice. Hit them with the old charisma and they’ll roll over and die for you. But don’t mistake that for the real thing, Michael. It’s a trick, that’s all. Like a dog walking on its hind legs.’
From amazement Davey grew quickly to anger. He never could deal with criticism in an adult way. He thought Mills was mocking his achievements because her own life lacked fulfilment. A man of real moral worth would have been gentle with her because of that. Davey went for her heart.
‘Five years you’ve been with me. Why, if you thought it was all a charade? Because you loved me? I wonder you’d waste your precious feelings on a crippled egomaniac! Or was that the point? Maybe you think a cripple’s man enough for you. You’re probably right: a whole man probably wants more than an old maid has to offer.’
She gave a low animal cry and lunged at him; he repelled her with a swing of his forearm. His cheek stung and he felt the cool of blood on his skin. ‘Use your claws on me, would you, you cat? You don’t want to be so touchy. After all, you saw through the mask, didn’t you, you know exactly what I am. A trickster, an illusionist.
‘Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, Jennifer Mills, but there’s thousands of people all across Europe who wouldn’t agree with you. They think I have something to say. They think it’s more than a cheap trick. They come to me in despair and they leave with hope. Now, you can make fun of me and you can make fun of them, but the fact is they get something they need, something they’re looking for, or they wouldn’t come. And they do come, and keep coming. Hundreds of them. Thousands.’
‘They come,’ she cried, shrill with exasperation, ‘because they’re scared shitless about the horror stalking them and willing to try anything, even a bucket-mouthed Welsh prophet, for a promise of better things to come. Give you your due, Michael, you’re good at meaningless promises. I should know.’
‘It’s not meaningless,’ he shouted. ‘What I teach makes a difference. You know that. Whenever we go back—’
‘Things have settled down,’ she agreed. ‘No more killings. No more tarts with their throats cut. You still don’t see, do you? The killings stop because they’ve served their purpose.’
Davey went cold. ‘What purpose?’
‘Frightened people turn to men like you. I thought that was a good thing. I thought, Does it matter if some little tart who’s going to die soon – of Aids or drugs or at the hands of a dissatisfied customer – goes now, if it brings a whole town to its senses? I thought, It’s probably the only chance this little whore will get to make a worthwhile contribution to society. If you’re a surgeon or a teacher’ – she smiled thinly – ‘or a preacher, your whole life’s a contribution. But how many whores get a chance to change a community for the better? It wasn’t hard to convince myself I was doing the right thing, even for them.’
Davey stared at her, and though he was deeply appalled it didn’t occur to him to doubt. It fitted with what Liz Graham had said. It fitted in other ways too. ‘You killed them? Those young girls? For Christ’s sake, woman, are you mad?’
She considered that open-mindedly, then nodded. ‘Perhaps I am. It can’t be normal, can it, to do something like that? And take pleasure in it.’
‘Pleasure?’
‘Satisfaction then.’ Her tone was conciliatory. ‘It was at least that. They owed me that much. You did.’
‘Me?’ The echo was fainter this time.
‘Of course you. I did it for you. Because you needed my help, and I’ve always given you what you needed. Even when I hated it. Even when I hated every shameful, sordid minute. I’ve prowled backstreets any decent woman would run a mile from, for you. I’ve dealt with the scum of the earth for you: pimps and madams and girls who make a cesspit of their insides for pay. And I’ve had to haggle with them, and tell them what you wanted for your money. I’ve had them in my car, bringing them to you, and an hour later with the stink of you still on them I’ve taken them back where I found them. Did you never wonder what that was doing to me?’
‘I’m a man,’ he mumbled, avoiding her gaze, ‘and a cripple. I have normal needs but I can’t take care of them the usual way. You said you’d help. You said you didn’t mind.’
‘I gave up everything for you!’ she cried. ‘I could have had anything I wanted: a husband, children, a nice house. Friends. I don’t have any friends, do you know that? And I don’t see my family any more because it upsets my mother to see what you’ve done to me.’
‘Me?’ he repeated, astonished. ‘What have I done? I’ve done nothing to you.’
‘You’ve squandered my life, Michael.’ The bitterness in her voice sank to a quiet accusation that pierced deeper. ‘I gave you everything I had – my time and my heart and my soul – and you used them and gave nothing in return. You let me waste my
life on you. You said you needed me. I thought it was no distance from need to love, that if I served you faithfully you would love me. I could be patient. I didn’t mind waiting.
‘In the mean time there was so much to do, so many ways I could help. When you talked about your vision for the crusade I could see what you were capable of but it wasn’t going to happen the way you were going about it. That was my mission: to make your dream come true. I thought that, by doing that, working with you and being with you and earning your gratitude, I’d make my dream reality too.
‘And do you know, I really thought it was working? I ran myself into the ground for you, but it was worth it because I could see you, feel you, changing towards me. There was a warmth there that was more than the mere friendship we started with. I thought it was, at least, affection. I thought all my investment was finally paying off.
‘I don’t suppose you remember Hastings, do you?’ There was no more light on his face but she knew from his silence that he did not. She gave an odd steely sigh that was half resignation and half indictment. ‘No, why would you? It was nothing very special to you. But I thought – God, what a fool! – I thought you were proposing marriage.
‘You came to my room in the hotel. You asked me to sit down, there was something you had to say. You apologized in advance for how clumsy it was going to sound but you were used to talking Grand Design, found it hard to discuss personal matters. And of course, being in that chair complicated the issue: it meant there were things you wanted but had no right to ask for … And you were talking slower and slower, and your eyes were glued to your knees.
‘I came so close to making an idiot of myself that night. I could see how embarrassed you were. I thought I could put you out of your misery by accepting your proposal before you even got it out. I actually had my mouth open to say Yes – yes, Michael, I’ll marry you, yes, please – when? Only what you actually said was, “So could you round me up a hooker?”
‘I loved you, Michael,’ she cried in bitter anguish. ‘I’d have done anything for you. But you shouldn’t have asked that. If it was comfort you wanted I’d have given it. Comfort, companionship, whatever. I’d have done that for you, gladly. But it wasn’t me you wanted, it was tarts – little tarts with their dirty minds and their dirty laughs. And always so young. Why, were you afraid a grown woman would despise your frailty? Do you think anyone seeing you in that chair would expect a perfect lover? Don’t you think that a woman who loved you might not care about the bits that don’t work?’
She was throwing too much at him all at once. He didn’t know how to react. He stumbled, ‘You said you understood—’
‘I lied,’ she said quietly. ‘I did that for you too.’
Since she first dropped this bombshell – and bombshell it was, he had genuinely never suspected – there had been something he’d needed to know but dared not ask. Now he forced himself. ‘You said, killings. How many?’
More than anything she’d said, the fact that she had to work it out, that it wasn’t branded in the forefront of her mind in letters of fire, impressed on him how utterly divorced from reality she had become. ‘Si-ix,’ she said slowly, thinking. ‘No, five – the one in Caen was a coincidence. I was going to do one of them – who knows, I might have picked her – but someone else had the same idea. I went to the cinema instead.’
‘Five,’ whispered Davey. ‘Does that include—?’
‘The two here,’ she supplied helpfully, ‘yes.’
‘One was a hooker. One was a schoolgirl on a pony.’ His voice cracked. ‘What did you think killing her would achieve?’
Her voice was barred with irritation, as if he wasn’t paying attention during lessons. ‘You saw what it achieved. It filled the tent, night after night.’
‘She was a child,’ he whined. ‘What possible quarrel could you have with her?’
‘None at all,’ she freely admitted. ‘She paid the price of this bloody town’s indifference, that’s all.
‘I knew Castlemere was going to be uphill work when I got here. The people I talked to had no interest in moral revival. I didn’t want you preaching to an empty tent so I needed something to fire them up. I can still do that for you, Michael. I can bring people to you when you can’t bring them yourself.
‘I can drive into some town where I’ve maybe only been once before, late at night, and within half an hour I’ll have found where the whores hang out. I look for the same sort of girl as when I’m looking for you.’ Ice cracked in her voice. ‘How does that feel, knowing that there are girls dead only because they were Your Type? Taller girls, older girls, thinner girls were all quite safe. They’d do just as well to put the fear of God into a town but they wouldn’t satisfy me the same. Because what I did I did for you, but the manner of doing it was for me. My reward.
‘I hated them for being Your Type. I should have hated you, only then I’d have had to leave. But you and your crusade were all that was left of my life: if I walked away I’d have nothing. So I continued to believe that, even if your feet were clay to the hips, your work was still important. Important enough to demand sacrifices. Instead of hating you I hated the girls, and when a sacrifice was needed they served.’ She smiled tightly. ‘It was after Hastings that I saw what I had to do. It was a while before I could make myself do it, but now it doesn’t cost me a moment’s grief.
‘When I came here last week and realized the trouble you were going to have, I searched the papers for some fresh horror you could stir these people with. But there was nothing. So I found a little whore and slit her throat.
‘And do you know what happened? Nothing. It was as if she was a stray cat run down in the road. They didn’t find her for two days and then she was in the canal. I left her on the wharf but someone tipped her in the canal rather than call the police! I couldn’t believe it. What kind of people behave like that? There was a paragraph on page two of the local rag; the police asked some questions, didn’t make much progress; then everything went quiet.
‘It was as if the little slut had never lived. I mean, that’s why I did it: so that her death would make more sense than her life. And these people didn’t give a damn. Charisma had died for them, and I’d killed for them, and they didn’t even care. Too busy, you see. This is a prosperous little town and everyone’s busy grabbing a share. Charisma wasn’t their business. They weren’t interested.
‘I had to get their attention somehow. If they weren’t bothered by a tart dying in a dark alley, I thought, let’s see what they make of a bit of butchery in their park in broad daylight. The girl on the pony was perfect: as soon as I saw her I knew her death would make the shop-keepers and bank clerks and factory undermanagers sit up and take notice. And by God I was right! Do you remember the tent that night? I thought we’d never squeeze them all in. I thought the canvas would split with their clamour.’
Her voice warmed as she relived it. ‘Oh, Michael, do you remember how it was? – the excitement passing between them like electricity? Most of them had never been to a gospel meeting before, never would have done, and it was a revelation to them. The sense of involvement. The way a congregation feeds on itself, concentrating all that faith and commitment until those there are no longer individuals but combine in a great seething mass of energy, ready to move mountains.
‘And you, Michael: I thought you were so fine that night. Incandescent. I thought, and I knew it was blasphemous but I thought, It must have been like this watching Jesus preach.’
Davey was stunned. ‘A man damn near died because of what I started that night.’
She shrugged that off. ‘Sacrifice is part of the process. I believed that what we were doing was more important than any one life.’ Her tone altered abruptly then, all the fanatic joy going out of it. It grated like cinders. ‘That was before you decided it maybe wasn’t as important as getting into bed with another man’s wife. The things I’d done for you, that I’d justified by the importance of your mission! But if the mission wasn’t so
important after all, I wasn’t justified in doing whatever was necessary to make it succeed.
‘That was when I looked at you afresh. You weren’t the man I believed you to be. You weren’t worth killing for. You were a man in love with the sound of his own voice. Not me, I knew not me, and not the little tarts you had me buy for you, and not even this woman who was supposed to be the great love of your life. Yourself: your own ego. The rest of us, even the people in the tent who were supposed to be the reason for it all, were just – props. It’s all an act. I’ve spilt blood for you, some of it innocent blood, and you aren’t even real. It’s all been a terrible mistake. I mistook the charisma for the man.’
He didn’t know what to say to her. She seemed to expect an apology. But he hadn’t asked her to kill for him, was appalled by what she’d done. Even when he searched his heart he found no impulse of guilt. ‘What are you going to do now?’
Her voice was edged with annoyance. ‘I’m not going to run, if that’s what you think.’
‘I’m sure that’s wise. The police know. If you want,’ he offered, meaning it kindly, ‘we could go to them together.’
He caught the movement in the dark as she nodded. ‘Yes, we’ll go together. But not to the police.’ The gleam in her hands as she moved towards him was his first intimation that it was not one of her fingernails that had cut his cheek.
As the chair came slowly towards them, for long seconds Liz could make no sense of the shape coalescing from the dark. She could not tell if it were one person or two, male or female, in the chair or pushing it. It remained amorphous almost until it reached the little knot of people waiting on the wharf.
Then she saw that it was Davey in the chair, pushing himself awkwardly, the thrust of his arms hampered by the woman’s body lying across his legs. Jennifer Mills’ head hung limp, moving too readily with the sway of the chair on the uneven ground, and her eyes were open and glazed.