The Crime Writer

by Jill Dawson

  ‘I couldn’t resist a look in your art-room,’ she’s saying, as she clicks down the stairs in her kitten-heeled slippers, straightening out her little pink jumper over her little pink midriff.

  She doesn’t even say: I hope you don’t mind. I do mind. I’m blazing, and she can see that. But she has her own sly power now, and she can’t wait to use it.

  ‘Beautiful. Such a lovely – you have quite a talent. It’s even dedicated to her. There can’t be any mistake, whatever you say. I know it’s Sam Gosforth.’

  ‘Yes, it’s Sam,’ I say coldly. The portrait was finished from memory and propped up, in front of others. There seems no other way to play it. ‘And now you promised you would leave.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure I want to leave now! I haven’t had my port – and I brought such a splendid bottle with me. Let’s open it, shall we?’

  ‘Ginny, I’m tired – I—’

  ‘Oh, just a little one, eh? A teensy-weensy little one? Because, after all, now we have so much to talk about! About how lovely Sam was and how it was indeed her that night when Izzie and I saw you in Aldeburgh, the night that Gerald so sadly chose to do away with himself . . .’

  And so it sets up again and when it comes, the familiar clamour, I don’t know if it’s a welcome relief, a release, or just exhausting. Here it is: should I push her under a car? Might she run out in front of it so I can drive it straight at her, blood and guts and mashing, mashing, can I do that? Should I just use a cushion – here’s one beside me on the sofa – and smother her now? But then there’s the old problem, the perennial problem: how to get rid of the body. So it has to be suicide – but two of those already! Is that pushing my luck? Though Ginny is an obsessive, a prowler, by definition something of a crazy, maybe it would be plausible. OK, if not suicide then an accident – yes, this time an accident: could she fall down the stairs in this house? Could she slip – she’s drunk enough, one glass more of port would do it – in the garden outside and drown in the stream there? But if it’s here it will bring attention to me, bring the police, the newspapers here, there would have to be an inquest. So what can it be that throws suspicion away from me? It has to be somewhere without witnesses. An accident that involves her alone, with no link to me.

  Picturing it now: the Martello tower, that child’s sandcastle tower as real as real can be, but just exactly like make-believe. The ejaculations of that angry white spray as it splashed up against the jetty. The long drop behind the wall. The signs: Danger! Unguarded drop. High tide. Icy cold. No one could climb out in darkness, hold onto those slippery wooden posts. Anyone who walked there alone, and had the misfortune to slip off the high walkway in high tide (a shove in the darkness, a scream that no one so far from those sugared-almond-coloured houses could possibly hear or know was human) – do seagulls scream in that haunting, disturbing, wailing way, piercing the low hypnotic howl of the sea, or are they silent, sleeping at night-time in that lonely spot? I feel almost sad and sorry, thinking like this. But I have begun and now I give my wicked self the rein.

  How to lure someone to their death? Make them go to the place you want them to? Well, pretty easy if that person has a habit of following you. Perhaps has been following you for several years.

  After she’s left, after I’ve heard the little red Triumph tear away, I have the strongest instinct that she’s waiting further up the road, that she hasn’t gone far at all. She’ll be somewhere, if possible, where she can watch the house, see if my bedroom light goes out. She probably picked up on my prickly mood; on the fact that I didn’t seem to be getting ready to go to bed, despite my insistence that she left. Perhaps she thinks I’ve some unfinished business, something to tidy up in Aldeburgh or somewhere else.

  In any case. If it’s to happen, it has to be tonight. I gather my coat, the flashlight and a leather thermos, into which I pour a good jigger of port. I leave lights on in the house downstairs, so that if the old hag Mrs Ingham is watching she will think I’m still at my desk, working. There is a huge fat moon, which is rather too bright, turning the pink walls of Bridge Cottage a lurid shade of blood-orange, but it can’t be helped.

  No one sees me leave the house. I slip into the car and it obediently starts up. Take the route towards the cemetery, past the well, and the telephone booth and the strange sign – Christ who died upon the rood, grant us grace our end be good – which makes me think of the little church in Fort Worth and how as a child I thought, What is the ‘rood’? A misprint of ‘rod’ or ‘road’? Deliberately misspelt to rhyme with good?

  I don’t pass the Triumph. Such a noticeable, flashy car, it would be hard to miss. She must be skilled at this, has had enough practice. Knows how to wait somewhere discreet, perhaps parked behind another car. Could I be wrong about her? Has she given up, gone home? I’m reminded of that night I took a walk, early in my stay at Earl Soham, the intense feeling I had that night of being followed. I reach to the overhead nylon net in the roof of the car, feel for the map, then remember that I lent it to Ronnie and no longer have it. No matter. The names of the villages fly by on signs: Saxtead, Brandeston, Debenham. Each has an association with Ronnie somehow: a church; a crab-apple- or blackberry-picking occasion; the blue-violet sloes we picked for gin; the scent of the creamy white elderflowers that made sweet cordial . . .

  Not Ronnie. No good thinking about Ronnie now. No good remembering that occasion when he asked what was my earliest memory and told me his and of course it was something green and healthy about oaks and the ancient boundaries of flat land Debach. Even before I told him mine I was thinking: Anyone who has lived three years as a baby and has never had their small face screamed into by a mother whose spittle they can feel on their skin – that comment Sam made about baby-carriages and how fear turns to evil – is probably going to be all right. Is going to grow into something nourishing. And I told him mine: Fort Worth and the boarding-house garage. Mother dumping me to go on her first date with Stanley. Those two men, for some reason I think they were travelling salesmen, who visited that day and carried me to the bench in Granny’s garage, and lifted my dress and did something mysterious and ugly to me; and Ronnie suddenly had such a pained expression, such a bleak, sad look in his eyes, and murmured, Oh, Pats, you always take such sides with the past, with others’ damnation of you, which surprised me, and I quit what I was saying and said, ‘What? What do you mean?’ and, of course, we were tongue-tied and could say no more and I had to change the subject just to make his sad expression shift. And then remembering another comment of Ronnie’s. I was complaining about biographers – was it Frances or Ginny? I can’t remember who – and he said in his ridiculous, random way: ‘Well, darling, she’s just a barnacle on the cruise ship that is Patricia Highsmith’s life.’ And that one I loved, and it makes me smile again now.

  At last. Headlights in the rear-view mirror and the shape of the low sports car that could be hers, I can’t be sure. I drive on regardless, faster than normal, taking the bends rather recklessly, hands a little slippery with sweat, heart knocking against my ribcage, like ice in a glass. What time is it? Must be past midnight. The main glitch will be witnesses. Anyone who sees my car, sees her following me or walking on the path to the tower. Anyone who sees me in Aldeburgh. But at this hour? The British licence laws seem like a blessing for the first time: the bars will have been cleared by now, the last drunks gone home. I pass the church of St Peter and St Paul, with its arch that, Ronnie showed me, frames the first lovely view of the sea at Aldeburgh. But that’s daytime. Ronnie’s concerns are daytime ones: who is buried there, which poet is commemorated here. Tonight the church is unlit and unlovely and cannot save a single soul.

  I park on Crabbe Street out of habit, then think that too far to walk and drive further, up towards the yacht club. Slaughden Quay. Something Ronnie said about a whole village being lost to the sea, here, long ago. So. One little person should be a cakewalk. Where she parks is her own business. All I need concern myself with is witnesses. Making sure n
o one sees me walk to the tower. If they see her – if they believe she’s taking a late-night walk alone – no problem.

  The moment I cut the engine I hear the masts of the sailboats, from the yacht club to my right, jangling in the wind, demonically. Sounding not so much like coins being jingled in a pocket now but the bells of jesters, jeering, rattling in the strong wind, gathering into a high-pitched inhuman sound, a soundless scream. And down a long tube of years I hear it again: the stockyard back home in Texas with the great steaming hustle of longhorns powering down it; the jingling spurs on the men’s boots, the cowboys’ jangling whistles, the clinking bells around the necks of the dumb massing beasts. To my left the sea throws itself at the wall, smacks and retreats, over and over. Abject darkness. I think I heard another car engine being cut, wheels popping slowly through shingle and ice-puddles. I don’t turn to look: I pretend I’ve no idea I’m being followed.

  I grasp the flashlight in my pocket, feeling the switch with my thumb but keeping it unlit. I swig the port and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, walk briskly along the stony high wall, once tripping slightly over an abandoned piece of rope, the sea snarling and growling alongside me, hair whipping into my face. There’s no sign of her and I wonder for a moment if I’m wrong, if my whole plan is hopeless. Curious that every occasion when I didn’t want to see her – the party in London, the Victoria, the BBC interview, the night of Gerald’s death – she contrived to be there. What are the chances of her letting me down now? If she does, I’ll simply take an invigorating walk – stimulating for the brain when writing and therefore never wasted – then go home. And yet I know I won’t. I finish the port, sweet and hot, and I’m conscious of a fast, pattering heartbeat, stinging cold nose and ears and the wind dancing around me, snapping hair into my eyes, taunting. To my left, if I were to flash the light towards them, are the warnings. Unguarded drop. Beach levels may vary. Danger! Keep clear of the edge. A feeling of the icy sea creeping up at me, like the tongue of a huge dog. Fear. What am I afraid of? Being followed? This makes no sense. I wanted her to follow me here. Not another soul in sight.

  I stride out, away from the shingle, along the parking lot and the path that leads to the tower. There is enough moonlight to see the edge of the walkway I’m on and the dark, glowering hump of the tower in front of me. The white edges of the sea’s mouth, its fathomless interior yawning beside me. It makes me want to giggle. Silly Ginny! How she tried to get me to talk about my characters as if they were real people, based on real lovers or women in my life, whereas every writer knows that a character is both real and a secret ungodly form from somewhere else entirely.

  Now I notice a light sweat on my palms despite the cold and a dripping feeling down my back: is that sweat, and fear, too? I stumble again on some goddamn bit of old fishing stuff, and kick a bucket, and it makes a startlingly loud sound. Did I hear steps behind me? Is she behind me? Did I smell for a minute that smothering perfume, that sickening feminine smell? Sure, that’s her – I see her at last, a dark shadow with a ponytail clip-clopping towards me.

  She’s even calling, ‘Wait! Sorry, I’m sorry, let’s not fall out! I’m not going to say anything at all about Sam, I promise. I only want to be with you. I love you, Pats,’ and I have such a powerful desire to scream, ‘Shut up!’ She’s as bad as Ronnie, with her ridiculous belief in this four-letter word. Instead I duck behind a broken remnant of wall in front of the tower, shivering on the icy grass, coiled in the position of a child, the sea glowering beside me.

  I hear her footsteps running up to me and one slip, one push as I leap out and surprise her and that’s all it will take – I spring out and grab at her ankles, she’s down like a skittle with a great thump and over so fast, slipping, and then – well, in the end it almost is an accident, I’m not sure I ever really meant to do it. I don’t think I even push her. It’s icy here, we’re twenty feet up, it’s naturally slippery, she slipped – the drop into black vastness, I barely even hear the splash, just a grey lump tumbling and then the sea swallowing her in silence. I look over and see nothing. Not even the Thing is there, though I half expect him to be and stare into the blackness searching for him. Very few people have seen him in their lifetime, but I have, I’m one who has, I tell myself. I think I hear her voice. The masts have quit their clinking, the wind has dropped, and the air is bracingly silent. And then it’s not her voice I hear but another young girl’s – is it Rachel Barber, the flame-haired girl, is it my first love? – saying, Oh! and the voice is not much like Ginny’s or Rachel’s either, but like mine. A girl’s voice; a squeak of surprise. I’ve thought of this so often; this is what I’ve been thinking of virulently since the age of eight. I’ve tried it in every shape, visited it on others, every which way, over and over. Has it made it any easier? Am I any nearer to being able to imagine it? Brother Death: a sibling, a seed, a dark twin; something we each carry in us from the start and spend our lives desiring and refusing to know. Only a small shock now about the when or the how of it, and realising what I guess we all know but spend our time not knowing: we’re all on our way there. Here we go. Perhaps it’s only ordinary. Perhaps it’s as Ronnie once said of our friendship: simply tender and true.

  Acknowledgements

  I’ve long been addicted to Patricia Highsmith’s fiction and I hope that fellow fans will enjoy spotting the many references to her novels and short stories and echoes of her favourite themes and literary conceits in The Crime Writer, as well as some real events from her life, as documented by her biographers. For those not familiar with her work, the following information might be helpful.

  While living in Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham in the 1960s, Highsmith was writing – among other things – the novel A Suspension of Mercy (published in the United States as The Storyteller (Doubleday, 1965) and she used the cottage and the house beside it and the Suffolk countryside as a setting, as I have. That novel tells of Sydney Bartleby, a scriptwriter who fantasises endlessly about killing his wife.

  The non-fiction book Highsmith was also writing while at Bridge Cottage was published in 1966 as Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (The Writer, Inc, 1966).

  Stalkers are a favourite theme of Highsmith’s, most notably in This Sweet Sickness (Harper & Brothers, 1960). Poison-pen letters are a device in her novel A Dog’s Ransom (Knopf, 1972).

  Many will know that Highsmith had a deep love of snails and her biographers describe her taking them to parties in a handbag or smuggling them from France under her bra. The descriptions of the snails were suggested by Highsmith’s novel Deep Water (Harper & Brothers, 1967) where Vic Van Allen watches his beloved snails mating and nicknames them Hortense and Edgar; and by the short story ‘The Snail Watcher’, which appears in the collection The Snail Watcher and Other Stories (Doubleday, 1970).

  The character of Sam is in many ways an evocation of the eponymous Carol from Highsmith’s famous novel of love between women, Carol, (first published as The Price of Salt under the pen-name Claire Morgan; Coward-McCann, 1952). Carol, too, is elegance personified, in a troubled marriage and the mother of a daughter, but unlike Sam she is braver about defying convention.

  The scene where Highsmith imagines how it would feel to be interviewed about the murder she has committed is a pastiche of that idea in Strangers on a Train (Harper & Brothers, 1950). The scene where Highsmith suffers an alcoholic blackout was suggested by a scene in the same novel where Bruno starts to suffer from the DTs and finds he can’t speak properly or use his hands.

  Highsmith’s memory of being caught dressing up by Miss Rose, the tennis coach, was inspired by the famous moment in The Talented Mr Ripley (Coward-McCann, 1954) when Dickie Greenleaf surprises Tom Ripley in the act of trying on his clothes and reacts furiously. The device of carrying the corpse of Gerald to the car and pretending he has committed suicide is of course the same ploy Ripley uses to rid himself of the odious Freddie in the same novel.

  The concept of the little man who appears to her occurs in Hi
ghsmith’s short story ‘Not in this life, Maybe the Next’ collected in Mermaids on the Golf Course (Otto Penzler Books, 1988). Her biographers also tell of a hallucination of a little mouse or ‘grey blob’ that she saw as a child.

  The terrapin scene is an echo of Highsmith’s story ‘The Terrapin’ in the same collection. The mother in that story (a commercial artist like Highsmith’s mother) was the inspiration for the character of Mary Highsmith in my novel. The coat-hanger attack scene in Bridge Cottage is an actual one, which took place in 1965 and resulted in a local doctor, Dr Auld, having to sedate Highsmith, as recounted by both her biographers.

  I’m grateful to those people who helped me with my research. In particular I owe a debt of gratitude to Highsmith’s biographer Joan Schenkar for meeting with me and for the generosity of her response to my requests. Andrew Wilson’s biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow, is a model of fairness and compassion and a fascinating read. If readers would like to know more about Highsmith’s life and work I urge them to read her stories and novels along with the biographies and memoir mentioned below. I’m grateful to Liz Calder, to Ronald Blythe for his kindness and generosity, and to Lord Bragg for pertinent and helpful insights. I was lucky enough to meet the bookseller Brian Perkins (Senior) in Fort Worth, Texas, who knew Highsmith as a child. I’d like to thank him for clearing up the mystery of the little ‘flame haired girl’ – Highsmith’s first love.

  My thanks go as ever to my editor Carole Welch and my agent Caroline Dawnay and their assistants Jenny Campbell and Sophie Scard. Special thanks must go to Carole and to my husband Meredith Bowles for being my first intrepid readers and for their skilful interventions, invaluable comments and input. Fellow writers Sally Cline, Louise Doughty and Kathryn Heyman have, as ever, kept me going with their support and friendship. My friend Geraldine Harmsworth supplied me with a brilliant line – and I hope she enjoys seeing it here. I’m always grateful to my family Lewis, Felix and Poppy for their forbearance while I’m writing.