by Chris Petit
When the phone rang again she knew before she answered who it was. His flat voice touched her like a cold blade.
‘What did you think of my humble abode?’
Sick, she wanted to say, sick beyond belief, but no words came into her mouth, just a terrifying blank.
Eventually she said, ‘It left me with a taste of ashes,’ not knowing what she meant by it.
There was a low chuckle at the other end. ‘Dust to dust.’
She said a line she remembered from her father’s funeral. ‘We brought nothing into this world and it is certain that we can carry nothing out.’
‘Where’s that from?’ he asked sharply.
‘The funeral service.’
‘Oh, very good,’ he said, a flicker of appreciation detectable in his monotone. ‘You’re quite a girl, aren’t you, Jill?’
‘They’ll say it at my funeral and they’ll say it at yours.’
‘Death is the only certainty. Who else is listening to us?’
‘Nobody. I saw Becky the other day.’
‘Becky who?’ he said, without missing a beat.
‘Becky your wife.’
There was a long silence before he said, ‘You and I will be as one.’
Westerby felt her skin turn to gooseflesh.
‘What do you want?’ she said in an effort to sound businesslike. When he didn’t answer she went on. ‘I’ve seen your room. I see someone suffering enormous pain and understand that person needs help.’
‘I want to see you.’ His voice came down the phone hot and salivary. Until then it had sounded as dry as iron filings.
‘I don’t think I can.’ She should not have said that, she realized. String him along, don’t shut down any avenues of approach. ‘When?’ she added quickly.
‘Would you like to meet?’
‘Yes, very much.’ Pretend, pretend to sympathize, she told herself. Forget about the rising nausea.
‘Am I right in thinking you understand something in all of this?’
Don’t be too clever with him. ‘You’ve shown me things I’m trying to understand, but you’re a long way ahead.’
‘Don’t play the cunt with me,’ he said sharply. Then he rang off.
She sat for a long time afterwards shaking. She felt dirty, like she was involved in some squalid seduction, pretending feelings she didn’t have and swallowing her revulsion until it built up as acid in her stomach. She shivered. She felt naked. For the first time since starting her affair with Cross she felt uncomfortable with her body. She was afraid for the vulnerability of her flesh and when she got dressed she deliberately put on her thickest, ugliest jersey, a Christmas present from her mother.
Moffat had been impressively thorough, Cross had to admit, but had come up with nothing. The sombreness of his mood was prompted by the explosion at the flat.
‘It must have been a bloody cunning device to have fooled Sparrow. Four kids without a father now.’
When Moffat’s team had gone back to go over the place they’d discovered the oven packed with Semtex. Only extreme precaution had prevented the whole lot going up. The building had been evacuated and the bomb squad called in. After that no one was sure what had happened. There had been a second device, perhaps, triggered by the dismantling of the first. The explosion had killed two bomb squad men and ripped through the flat. The fire started by the blast destroyed the contents before they could be rescued. All that remained was the notebook that Westerby had taken. That at least was safe.
The handwriting in the notebook had been analysed by an expert in dyslexia and did not tell them anything that Westerby hadn’t guessed. Cross saw more clearly now that Candlestick’s early life was one of such parental and institutional neglect that – and this he found hard to accept – even some pity was called for. What would have happened if someone had taken some care? Would he have turned out different?
Registers, credit lists and market research surveys were checked to see if any contained all the names of the victims. Here the problem was that the team assembled for the purpose was not as good as Cross would have liked. Most were reservists, and second rate at that. They were dogged and worked to order but lacked any initiative, and with time running out both were in desperately short supply. Poor calibre apart, Cross suspected he’d not been able to tell them enough to function efficiently. There was no opportunity to display initiative even if there’d been anyone capable of it. The tight security around the Candlestick operation was strangling any opportunity for inspiration.
Moffat sympathized. He took Cross confidentially to one side. ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ he said. ‘The RUC just isn’t equipped to cope with this kind of inquiry.’
Cross looked around the room, which had the air of a class under detention. There were perhaps twenty constables working their way through different lists.
Moffat was sure that Candlestick’s information came from more than one source. Catherine Edge was too young to appear on the usual adult registers, and Arnold’s military background precluded him from appearing in the local civilian listings.
‘How does he know?’ asked Moffat. ‘How did he know, for example, that Mary Ryan was twenty-one?’
Cross said he knew because he’d had a long time to prepare himself. He doubted, even if they did discover his source of information, that it would lead them anywhere. Candlestick was the master of the dead end. The gutted basement flat would turn out to be another.
That indeed was the case. It had been bought in 1973 in the name of T. Worrall. A search revealed that it had been purchased cheap for cash. The previous owner was long dead and the name Worrall was yet one more alias.
Candlestick left Westerby on tenterhooks for several days. She worked unthinkingly, trying to get a clearer picture of the man. A thin file – the institutional record of his childhood – was forwarded from East Anglia. In the dead of night she squeezed her eyes tight shut as she gave her cry of surrender and came. Sex with Cross became more abandoned. When she was alone she was frightened by their intensity together.
She tried explaining it to him with a lightness she didn’t feel. In the past she’d always felt that there had been speed restrictions in her emotional life – driving’s equivalent to a built-up area, stopping and starting – and now with no warning she was travelling at blind speed out in the open and with no reason to slow down. She felt increasingly lost in Cross’s arms and gave herself up to it. For him too, she suspected, their coming together was an obliteration, a desperate attempt to counter the negative force of Candlestick’s world. Everything seemed excusable under the circumstances. She was falling in love too, but that was something she would never admit to Cross and rarely to herself.
From the file she made a sketch of Candlestick’s childhood and through phone calls to various people who’d been in charge of him as a boy she added to it. She listened to their cautious institutional voices, confirming her picture of a silent, withdrawn boy, fearsomely bright but educationally frustrated, given to outbursts of wildness and incoherent rage. He’d run away frequently. He was an only child and uncontrollable from the start. He showed up poorly at school and his dyslexia, which would have held him back, had almost certainly gone undiagnosed.
She was sure that his shadow history was one of abuse, both family and institutional. Her own background in the sex abuse unit had taught her of the frequency of abuse in any single-sex institution. It always surprised her that anyone expressed astonishment at such revelations. Corral humans together, deprive them of sexual outlets, and they’ll either invent their own or – if the regime were an authoritarian one – have them imposed from above.
He was the abused child in the dark and had sought out the darkness ever since.
She thought of the contrast of her own childhood, and the ease of it. They’d lived in a large, rambling house on the outskirts of the city through which she and her brothers had run free. She remembered her growing up in terms of protection and safety, only
vaguely aware that not far from where they lived was a dark forest of danger like the one in the fairy stories she had liked to read so much.
The significance of seven, she wrote. The rest of the page stayed blank a long time.
Cross was the closest to despair that she’d ever seen when he arrived that night. The hopelessness of the investigation weighed on him as a personal failure. He blamed himself for the explosion at the flat because he’d delayed unnecessarily. Westerby couldn’t help wondering in passing how close she had been to opening the oven door herself.
‘I should be leading by example,’ Cross said. ‘But I feel impotent most of the time.’ He looked at her and gave a bleak smile.
Westerby bit her lip. She knew what was coming.
It took him another half-hour to say it. When he did, she stared away, blinking back her tears.
‘Where will you stay?’ she asked.
‘Home or go to a hotel.’
‘Don’t go home,’ she said dully.
He crouched before her and took her hand. ‘You do see, it’s not because of us.’
Her sad laugh sounded like a sob. In a way, she could accept everything he had said. It wasn’t as though she’d been completely blind, hadn’t seen it coming. Yet, when it had, she felt like she’d been ambushed. All her rehearsed counter-arguments collapsed unvoiced as panic struck her speechless. It had all unravelled so quickly. Why hadn’t she dragged him to bed straight away?
‘There’s too much pressure. It would only—’ Cross stood up again, lost for words.
She was aware of putting him too much before everything else. Thoughts of him consumed her days and ate into her concentration, affecting her work. Anything not to do with tracking Candlestick was a distraction to be put aside, she knew that, and knew the pressure they were under would soon put an intolerable burden on them, knew too that the relationship existed in a false pocket created by the intensity of the investigation. If she were being honest, the truest picture of them would be of two people in a bell jar frantically trying to distract themselves from the fact that they were running out of air.
Cross proved reluctant to leave. She could see he was torn. What he really wanted, she suspected, was her approval of his decision, when all she wanted to do was to howl with despair.
She tried not to cling when he went. She tried to sound rueful rather than pathetic when she asked: ‘Is this an order, sir?’ She told herself that she would see him the following day as normal. He was right. Duty first.
With Cross gone she felt a terrible emptiness, in the flat and in herself. She went over their one-sided conversation. His depression about the investigation had knocked on to affect them, he’d said. He had no one else to talk to, no one he could trust, but between them they were not strong enough, and as the investigation failed they would fail each other.
Westerby shook her head, trying to disagree.
‘We won’t catch him. This time or the next,’ said Cross bitterly.
‘We have to believe we will,’ she replied, with a lack of conviction that betrayed what she really felt. Cross’s pessimism was infectious.
‘Moffat’ll get him first.’
She saw something about him she’d not seen before and didn’t like it. ‘You’re worried about Moffat beating you to Candlestick. It’s the rivalry between the two of you that this is all about.’
She shouldn’t have said it, not if she’d wanted him to stay. Cross had turned immediately cold and left without saying goodbye.
What Westerby didn’t know was that Cross had agreed to go on holiday with his family, setting aside ten days at the end of August, only a week after Candlestick was next due to strike. The arrangement had provoked the present crisis. He was mad, he told himself. However much he owed the children a holiday, he was mad. He had no time. The Candlestick investigation took priority over everything. Regardless of his doubts over his ability to bring the case to a close, it could not be delegated. He was mad even to think of going. It would not mend things between him and Deidre, only compound their differences. That process had already started in the one discussion they’d had on the phone.
‘It would mean sending the children back to school late,’ said Deidre.
‘They’d enjoy that.’
‘What are you playing at?’
‘I’m not playing at anything. You know how little I see them.’
He wanted, but lacked the guts, to say that he’d take them on his own. Deidre broke the call, saying she had a meeting. What a mess, he thought.
Westerby was lying in bed when the phone went. She looked at the bedside clock. It was after one. Let it ring, she thought. It rang and rang. Finally she scrambled out of bed and ran to the living room, sure that she’d be too late.
‘Yes,’ she said.
It was Cross.
He came and this time everything was all right. As she took him into her Westerby felt certainty flood through her again. This was the answer, she told herself, his body and hers. She’d known that all along, even when he’d denied it. Their exploration of each other would somehow illuminate the larger investigation, in a way that she could not yet see, she was sure of that. The answer to Candlestick’s identity lay in their coming together. The thought both frightened her and gave her courage. Somewhere in the outer limits of herself she would find him, Candlestick, the dark shadow that lurks within us all.
While Cross slept she got up, not because she could not sleep but because her mind was clear and she wanted to work. The pool of light from the desk lamp, the hum of the computer, the touch of her dressing gown on her skin, all combined to create a feeling of harmony that had been absent only a short while before. She could see Cross from where she sat.
Time was banished while she worked, until she was aware of Cross asking what she was doing.
‘I didn’t hear you,’ she said. She looked round. It was daylight. ‘What’s the time?’
‘A quarter past six. You look cheerful.’
She considered. ‘Yes, I am.’
Cross peered at the screen. He was still only halfawake. ‘What are you doing?’
Westerby smiled. ‘Painting a portrait.’
Cross was intrigued by her new-found confidence. She talked without hesitation, saying that in a way – though nothing had changed – she felt they had turned a corner.
‘Which,’ she added, ‘is not to say we’ll stop the next murder or even the one after.’
‘But?’
‘I think I’ve discovered a chink. A very tiny one, but a chink nevertheless. The first sign of weakness I’ve been able to find.’
Catching Cross’s look of eagerness she laughed and said, ‘It doesn’t amount to more than a thimbleful of hope.’
‘Hope nevertheless.’
She nodded. Cross felt calmer after the crisis of the night before. It was the realization that he could not manage alone that had made him call her. He needed her – they needed each other – and recognizing that made any differences between them secondary.
‘Where does this hope come from?’
‘Let’s take motive first. The ultimate motive appears to be a culling of the children.’
‘Culling might be putting it a bit strong,’ Cross said. Westerby held up her hand to override him.
‘Not for a man with such a divine or diabolical sense of purpose. He talks about his terrible destiny and its connection with what he calls the larger resolution. He talks of division, division by age. Divide (by seven), he writes, but resolve unlike the larger division – the Troubles, presumably – which offers no solution. The smaller the division, the more they must pay attention. It seems pretty clear that his intention is the invention of a series of crimes so horrific that, as he says, the mothers of the dead will rise in protest. These killings won’t stop until the other killings stop. And there’s more – he says they’ll go on until the truth that lies behind everything is told. He’s put the word lies in inverted commas, to stress its double meaning.’
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‘Where’s the hope in all that?’
‘There isn’t any, yet. But the line about the mothers got me thinking. He wants them to protest. He wants them to stop what’s happening. And I wondered, and you might say it’s psychological mumbo-jumbo, if this isn’t to do with his own mother and the concern she never showed.’
Cross nodded cautiously to show that he was taking her seriously.
‘These are the slenderest of clues, barely even whispers in the grass. But I think seven has an importance in his own life. It signals some crisis. Something happened to him then.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Some psychological trauma. I doubt if we’ll ever know with the mother so far gone, and he’s probably buried it too deep to remember.’
‘Where’s his weakness?’
‘I think the nearer he gets to killing seven-year-olds, the closer he’ll be to revealing himself, because he’ll have to confront whatever it is he has suppressed. He’ll perhaps sense that in killing the children the real target is himself. Which might, just might, give him pause for thought.’
She took Cross next door and her mind ran free, the thoughts tumbling over each other as Cross’s tongue and hands roamed over her body until it felt divorced from the hard pebble-like thoughts in her skull.
‘Do it this way,’ she said when she was ready for him and he asked if he was hurting her and she didn’t answer. She thought: it’s easy, it’s so easy. I can read you and your shameful secret, the one you run so hard from, the one you do so much to deny. Did you like what Daddy did to you? How did it start? Bad Daddy and good Daddy. Secretly you liked bad Daddy best, though afterwards you burned with shame. You wanted it to stop and not to stop. What you wanted most of all was someone to stop it for you and tell you what was right and wrong. Wanted Mummy to come in and hold your hand, but she didn’t. Then you discovered she knew. Maybe she watched too, watched and knew and did nothing and said nothing afterwards, because she too was afraid of what Daddy could do to her. So she betrayed you, didn’t she? Let Daddy fuck you instead of fucking her. Let you take the punishment. Unique? I used to deal with cases like this every day. People grow up normal in spite of it.