Friday,
September 5
As George entered Castle Chambers he saw Edmund Hall on the stairs ahead of him.
He halted. He wouldn’t go into the inquest with the man. All right, he had a job to do. Probably the boy’s name would be more of a hindrance than a help to the police, a false trail. He wouldn’t prevent Edmund from doing his job. That didn’t mean he had to like the man.
As he entered the cream-coloured corridor off the landing he saw Edmund step through a doorway marked ENQUIRIES. George hurried past to the glass double doors outside the courtroom, but they were immovable, like false doors on a stage set. They added to the sense of unreality he was already beginning to feel. He’d never expected to visit such a place; he’d shown courtrooms in too many films. He retreated to the ENQUIRIES door.
At the end of an inner corridor was a waiting room for witnesses. A few people stood outside, smoking; inside sat a sobbing woman, rattling a cup of tea. George’s mother’s friend Ruby was comforting her, gazing at her with eyes that drowned in themselves, slapping her own heart as if to quicken its emotion. She was an actress, of course. That was how his mother had known her.
He stood outside the glass door. He didn’t feel equal to Ruby’s effusiveness today. As he stared at the lettering on the door he felt wholly unlike a witness—as if he’d undertaken the part without preparation. “All the world’s a stage”—yes, yes, all right.
He had insisted on being a witness. He had to be there, to make sure nothing wrong was said about his mother. He only hoped the inquest wouldn’t take long. Bill Williams had seemed to understand the projection this morning, but George wanted to be at the Newsham this afternoon, in case the projection went wrong again: he didn’t want the children running riot.
“Will the witnesses take their places in court, please,” a man said, very Scottish, and went to look after the sobbing woman.
The ceiling of the court was low. Ranks of benches and long tables stepped down on three sides of the room. Following the other witnesses to the furthest set of benches, George glimpsed Edmund leaning from the front bench opposite the coroner’s dais to greet him. He walked by, unheeding.
Ruby pressed close to him on the bench. “Who’s that lumberjack?” she demanded, nodding at Edmund. “Does he know you?”
“Just someone who’s writing up the case.” Half the people in Edmund’s set of benches must be reporters: a full house. Well, they had their job to do.
“He wants to hear what happened, does he? I’ll tell him. Your poor mother.” She dabbed hastily at her smudged mascara, thick as makeup in an early film. “I’ll never forget her face as long as I live. That terrible expression. Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be saying all this to you, you poor boy.”
She hadn’t disturbed him particularly—too theatrical. Overhead, a chair scraped, and loud, flat footsteps crossed the ceiling. Fat mushrooms full of light sprouted from pale splashes on the ceiling. The splashes of light vanished; the lamps hung dead in sunlight. George watched Edmund glancing rapidly about, snapping up details like a camera.
Last night, walking home, George had remembered whom Edmund reminded him of: the man from the London cinema chain who had come to see him six years ago. The man had been staying with friends; he’d admired George’s efficiency in running the Newsham with so little help, he’d said. George was the man they needed to run their new London cinema. But Olivia was happy in her first year at school, and Mark wanted to go to that school; George’s wife, Alice, hated big cities, except for her birthplace, Liverpool; most important, the Newsham was the only cinema his mother now owned. The man had understood none of this. Leaving, he’d glared back as if George had wronged him deliberately. Beneath all Edmund’s protestations of sympathy, George suspected, lay the same lack of feeling.
“Stand up, please,” the Scotsman ordered.
George jumped up, startled. The rest followed him. After a pause the coroner strode in behind the jury and onto his dais: a good dramatic entrance. The Scotsman began to read from a card: “All manner of persons having anything to do at this court, before the Queen’s Coroner for the county of Merseyside, touching the deaths of Lilian Pugh and Thomas Eric Hardy, draw near and give your attendance.” Surely he’d rehearsed it often enough not to need the script, George thought—but the thought didn’t dam the flood of shock he’d felt at the sound of his mother’s name.
Everyone else was sitting down; George joined them. The Scotsman was leading the jury in the oath. “I swear by Almighty God—”
“I swur by Almighty God—” Only the front row of four men was responding, translating his Scottish accent into Liverpudlian. When he’d finished he began again with the back row. George almost expected all eight to go through a final rehearsal. But the coroner was speaking.
“We have first to consider the death of Mrs. Lilian Pugh, nee Stanley, of 20 Princes Avenue. This is a very sad and tragic case, of a kind I have never met before. The police are investigating the circumstances. We are concerned only to determine the cause of the lady’s death. At about four o’clock on the morning of seventh August, it appears that Mrs. Pugh surprised an intruder in an act of extreme cruelty to her dog.”
His quiet voice continued. It was like the synopsis at the beginning of a serial episode. George was bewildered when he said, “I call George Bernard Pugh.” Surely he’d covered George’s part of the story in his synopsis. But the Scotsman was standing beside the witness box, waiting for him. “Take the book in your right hand,” he said.
“Your name is George Bernard Pugh and you’re the manager of the Newsham Cinema,” the coroner said.
“Yes.” He could swear to that.
“And Mrs. Lilian Pugh was your mother.”
“Yes, she was,” George said proudly, almost challengingly.
“She owned the Newsham, didn’t she? Did she own any others?”
The coroner was putting him at his ease by chatting. “She used to own the Granby and the Picton, she and my father,” he said. “But they closed in the sixties. The Granby closed last. That was just by where she was living. There were two cinemas there, and not enough audience for either.” He was babbling; he wished the coroner would stop him with a question.
“Your father isn’t alive now, is he?”
“No, he died seven years ago. The strain of knowing the cinemas would have to close killed him. That made my mother determined to keep the Newsham open. She was the business side of the marriage, you see.”
“Quite right,” the coroner said approvingly. “Quite right. Did your mother always live in Princes Avenue?”
“No, she moved there after my father’s death.” She’d said she had sold the house because she couldn’t cope with it, but he had known she wanted the money to put into the Newsham, though he’d never let her realize.
“And did you often visit her there? Did you visit her on the night of sixth August?”
“Yes, I did.” The jurymen were beginning to look away from him, dreading naked grief. But he felt that the coroner would lead him skillfully around that. He would be able to get back to the Newsham soon.
“I visited my mother, Mrs. Lilian Pugh, on the night of sixth August,” the coroner said. That’s odd, George thought: I didn’t see you there. It took him a moment to notice the tape recorder to which the coroner was confiding information.
“At about what time did you leave? Midnight. Did you happen to notice whether the front window of the flat was open?”
“Yes. She often left it open a little in summer. Rex guarded it during the night.”
“Rex was your mother’s dog. When I left at midnight the front window was open a little, comma.” By now George felt wholly detached from the proceedings. “Your mother wasn’t afraid of intruders?”
“She said not.” But he had been, on her behalf. Alice and he had had no room for his mother, but that hadn’t made it easier to think of her on Princes Avenue, among the gangs and burglaries and racial confrontations
.
The questions continued, and the echoes. Yes, his mother had had a couple of heart attacks—nothing serious, the doctor had said, provided she took it easy. No, she hadn’t seemed unwell that night. Silently he remembered her saying, “Good night now, dear,” turning carefully back toward the lighted hall, supporting herself with a hand on the doorknob, glancing back to make sure he was safe on his bicycle. He felt Edmund gazing intently at him—as if, he thought angrily, he had written the script.
“Do you know of anyone who might have had a grudge against your mother’s dog?”
“No, nobody.” The police had asked him that.
“She would have told me,” he said.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Pugh.”
Was that all? It seemed to have petered out, like some of the films he had to show nowadays. The coroner was telling the tape recorder that he knew nobody with a grudge against his mother’s dog. “I call Ruby Roberts,” he said.
Ruby swept her coat about her like Caesar adjusting his cloak for an oration, and grasped the Bible, gazing up as if she were Joan of Arc yearning for a friendly voice. “Is Ruby Roberts your real name?” the coroner said.
“Yes,” she said, eyes blazing. “It certainly is.”
He nodded, smiling faintly. “And did you know the deceased Lilian Pugh? You knew her from the theatre, didn’t you?”
Don’t start on the theatre, George thought; we’ll be here all day. “I knew her husband first,” she said. “He was on the stage, of course, before he went into showing pictures. A fine actor, and a fine man. How he would have felt if he’d seen his poor wife there, on the floor—”
“All right now,” the coroner said, holding up one finger. “We’re coming to that now. You went to Mrs. Pugh’s flat on the morning of seventh August?”
George switched them off. He felt almost disloyal listening to Ruby—it was like watching a play about his mother’s death. But then everything about his mother’s death had seemed theatrical: Ruby’s telephone call to him, hinting breathlessly at horrors; even the sight of the body. At the morgue he’d waited in a small bare room. Suddenly the curtains at a window before him had parted, exactly like the opening of a first act, and there had been his mother, lying covered with a sheet beneath a cymbal-shaded bulb. He’d felt cut off from her by more than the glass. Once he and his parents had played a game to see who could feign death the longest. His mother had looked more convincing then. Behind the glass she’d looked like someone inexpertly made up to resemble her.
“She was lying on the carpet, covered with blood,” Ruby said.
It must have ruined the carpet, then—his mother’s favourite, the Persian. His mother’s friend Mr. Billington, who had used to manage a cinema and who helped out at the Newsham for no more payment than the chance to watch films free, was sorting out everything at the flat. George hadn’t been able to go there. But now he couldn’t avoid hearing what Ruby had found there, what she’d held back from him.
“I could see they were bites,” she said. “But that wasn’t what turned me sick. It was the look on her face. She was looking at Rex, poor faithful beast.” She leaned toward the jury and said in a whisper that filled the court: “She died of knowing that what had happened to Rex was going to happen to her.”
That was her exit line. The coroner thanked her, but didn’t repeat what she’d said. A young policeman took her place in the box, blushing. Ruby sat down beside George, holding her heart in with one hand, squeezing his hand with the other.
All at once, with a cold horror for which he was wholly unprepared, George realized the policeman was confirming Ruby’s story.
The policeman wasn’t playing a part. He was plainly embarrassed and disturbed by what he had to tell. The court snapped into place around George, sharp and close. He saw the intent faces. He saw Edmund gazing at the coroner, admiring his lucidity and skill. He saw the young policeman’s white face, and knew he had been sick after he’d seen George’s mother. He felt his own legs trembling uncontrollably. He pressed his knees together, but still they shook.
Now there was a pathologist. The coroner echoed him. Even the echo was no longer unreal; it was twice as real, unbearably so. George saw his mother turning anxiously in the doorway to watch him ride away. Yes, the pathologist said, there were numerous lacerations. The marks of teeth. Not an animal’s. Portions of the flesh had been— George’s horror was mixed now with helpless rage that this audience should hear what had happened to his mother. All he could see was Edmund’s face, alert for every word. All he could hear was his own blood, punching his ears furiously.
“Stand up, please,” the Scotsman said.
The jury had returned; now the coroner strode in. “Mr. Foreman, what verdict do you return on the death of Lilian Pugh?”
“Pardon?” said the foreman uneasily.
“What is your verdict?” the coroner said, still as quietly.
“Death by misadventure.”
“Yes.” The coroner was nodding slowly, as if he knew the verdict was inevitable, even if not entirely satisfactory. Death by misadventure! George thought wildly. As if she had died in some unavoidable accident!
The coroner was gazing at him. “Please accept my deepest sympathies, and my hope that the culprit will quickly be brought to justice,” he said kindly. In a moment he was standing up.
“Stand up, please,” the Scotsman said.
The reporters were leaving. They’d come only to hear about George’s mother. Now that the show was over they were hurrying to lunch, a pint and a pie. George glared so fiercely at Edmund that he turned and followed the reporters. George waited until the man had had time to leave the building. “I’ll be in touch with you soon,” he told Ruby. He couldn’t bear her just now.
Reporters were crowding outside the courtroom. For a furious moment he thought they wanted to interview him. Then he saw they had surrounded Edmund. “I didn’t know you were back in town,” one was saying. “I’d have thought our provincial crimes were beneath you these days.”
George heard the sarcasm. It fed his own rage and his dislike of Edmund. His feelings welled up beyond his control. “He’s here writing a book,” he said viciously. “All about the things this monster has done. No doubt it’ll make him a lot of money.”
He strode furiously downstairs. In a room off the landing a girl was washing teacups by an urn. He halted in the wide sunlight of Castle Street, at the edge of the lunchtime crowd. He must go home to Alice. He wouldn’t be fit to run the Newsham until he’d told someone about all this. It was minutes before he ceased shaking and was able to cycle home.
Saturday,
September 6
__WHAT MAKES A MAN A MONSTER?
I’m here to find out, says writer.
Most people, unless their sensibilities have been numbed by the world we live in, still shudder when they hear of a murderer at large.
But one man who has reason to rejoice at every new atrocity is Edmund Hall.
His first book, Secrets of the Psychopaths, which he describes as “a serious study of the criminal mind,” contained detailed descriptions of sadism, incest, cannibalism, and necrophilia. It sold 100,000 copies.
“Crime has fascinated me ever since I was a child,” says Mr. Hall, who describes his books as “helping people to understand crime.”
Now he is in Liverpool, researching his new book on a psychopath. Yesterday he sat in on the inquest on Mrs. Lilian Pugh, whose death last month is being investigated by the police.
One man who is less than happy about Mr. Hall’s research is George Pugh, the son of the deceased Mrs. Pugh. After an angry scene with the writer outside the coroner’s court yesterday, Mr. Pugh told our reporter that the book was “bound to make a lot of money.”__
“Is Secrets of the Psychopaths only one book?” Clare said. “I thought you said it was a series.”
“They’ve deliberately misrepresented me,” Edmund said. He was gazing impatiently at the hotel room phone, thoug
h it hadn’t been long since he’d rung for drinks. “Can’t you recognize the tone? They’re the lot I used to work for. It’s pure jealousy, just because they had to stay in this grubby little town while I made it big in London. They haven’t changed. There used to be incredible petty rows because I wouldn’t join their union. God, I’m glad I’m out of that. Half of them couldn’t even spell.”
He picked up the telephone receiver, then clubbed the cradle viciously with it. “Now half the people we trace won’t want to talk. And no doubt the police will be warning me off their patch. Thank you, George Pugh. I can do without his help in future.”
“Won’t he be here?”
“Not if I can help it. Not if he can either, to judge by the way he behaved after the inquest.”
Walking back toward the Newsham, he had said he would invite George too. She had been looking forward to a return bout between the two men. Now here she was, alone with Edmund in his bedroom. She was wondering wildly if he’d engineered the situation, when someone knocked at the door.
It was a porter. “You took your bloody time,” Edmund said.
“I’m sorry, sir. We had to send out for this brand of bourbon.”
“Never mind the backchat. Leave them, I’ll pour. Wait a minute. Take that empty with you; don’t leave it for the bloody maid. I don’t want to sit and look at it, do I? Christ, these people,” he said to Clare as the porter strode silently out.
The empty bottle had been of bourbon. Surely he hadn’t drunk all that today? At least, she thought (remembering a bit of Shakespeare they’d all used to giggle over in her teens), he wouldn’t be able to do much, if he planned to seduce her. “Never mind, Edmund,” she said. “It can’t be that bad.”
“What can’t?” he said, snarling at the stiff cap of a gin bottle.
The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror Page 6