Not Safe After Dark

by Peter Robinson

  “And you like videos, too, don’t you? We’ve had a little talk with Mr. Hakim in your corner shop. He told us about one video in particular you’ve rented lately. Soft porn, I suppose you’d call it. Nothing illegal, true, at least not yet, but a bit dodgy. I’d wonder about a bloke who watches stuff like that.”

  “It’s a free country. I’m a normal single male. I have a right to watch whatever kind of videos I want.”

  “School’s Out,” Bentley said quietly. “A bit over-the-top, wouldn’t you say?”

  “But they weren’t real schoolgirls. The lead was thirty if she was a day. Besides, I only rented it out of curiosity. I thought it might be a bit of a laugh.”

  “And was it?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “But you see what I mean, don’t you? It looks bad: the subject matter, the image. It all looks a bit odd. Fishy.”

  “Well, it’s not. I’m perfectly innocent, and that’s the truth.”

  Bentley stood up abruptly and Rodmoor slipped out of the room. “You can go now,” the superintendent said. “It’s been nice to have a little chat.”

  “That’s it?”

  “For the moment, yes.”

  “But don’t leave town?”

  Bentley laughed. “You really must give up those American cop shows. Though it’s a wonder you find time to watch them with all those naughty videos you rent. They warp your sense of reality—cop shows and sex films. Life isn’t like that at all.”

  “Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind,” Reed said. “I take it I am free to go?”

  “Of course.” Bentley gestured toward the door.

  Reed left. He was shaking when he got out onto the wet, chilly street. Thank God the pubs were still open. He went into the first one he came to and ordered a double Scotch. Usually he wasn’t much of a spirits drinker, but these, he reminded himself as the fiery liquor warmed his belly, were unusual circumstances. He knew he should go back to work, but he couldn’t face it: Bill’s questions, Frank’s obvious disapproval. No. He ordered another double, and after he’d finished that, he went home for the afternoon. The first thing he did when he got into the house was tear up the copy of Mayfair and burn the pieces in the fireplace one by one. After that, he tore up his video club membership card and burned that, too. Damn Hakim!

  * * *

  “Terence J. Reed, it is my duty to arrest you for the murder of Deborah Susan Harrison . . .”

  Reed couldn’t believe this was happening. Not to him. The world began to shimmer and fade before his eyes, and the next thing he knew Rodmoor was bent over him offering a glass of water, a benevolent smile on his Bible salesman’s face.

  The next few days were a nightmare. Reed was charged and held until his trial date could be set. There was no chance of bail, given the seriousness of his alleged crime. He had no money anyway, and no close family to support him. He had never felt so alone in his life as he did those long dark nights in the cell. Nothing terrible happened. None of the things he’d heard about in films and documentaries: he wasn’t sodomized; nor was he forced to perform fellatio at knifepoint; he wasn’t even beaten up. Mostly he was left alone in the dark with his fears. He felt all the certainties of his life slip away from him, almost to the point where he wasn’t even sure of the truth anymore: guilty or innocent? The more he proclaimed his innocence, the less people seemed to believe him. Had he done it? He might have done.

  He felt like an inflatable doll, full of nothing but air, maneuvered into awkward positions by forces he could do nothing about. He had no control over his life anymore. Not only couldn’t he come and go as he pleased, he couldn’t even think for himself anymore. Solicitors and barristers and policemen did that for him. And in the cell, in the dark, everything seemed to close in on him and some nights he had to struggle for breath.

  When the trial date finally arrived, Reed felt relief. At least he could breathe in the large, airy courtroom, and soon it would be all over, one way or another.

  In the crowded court, Reed sat still as stone in the dock, steadily chewing the edges of his newly grown beard. He heard the evidence against him—all circumstantial, all convincing.

  If the police surgeon had found traces of semen in the victim, an expert explained, then they could have tried for a genetic match with the defendant’s DNA, and that would have settled Reed’s guilt or innocence once and for all. But in this case it wasn’t so easy: there had been no seminal fluid found in the dead girl. The forensics people speculated, from the state of her body, that the killer had tried to rape her, found he was impotent, and strangled her in his ensuing rage.

  A woman called Maggie, with whom Reed had had a brief fling a year or so ago, was brought onto the stand. The defendant had been impotent with her, it was established, on several occasions toward the end of their relationship, and he had become angry about it more than once, using more and more violent means to achieve sexual satisfaction. Once he had gone so far as to put his hands around her throat.

  Well, yes he had. He’d been worried. During the time with Maggie, he had been under a lot of stress at work, drinking too much as well, and he hadn’t been able to get it up. So what? Happens to everyone. And she’d wanted it like that, too, the rough way. Putting his hands around her throat had been her idea, something she’d got from a kinky book she’d read, and he’d gone along with her because she told him it might cure his impotence. Now she made the whole sordid episode sound much worse than it had been. She also admitted she had been just eighteen at the time as well, and, as he remembered, she’d said she was twenty-three.

  Besides, he had been impotent and violent only with Maggie. They could have brought on any number of other women to testify to his gentleness and virility, though no doubt if they did, he thought, his promiscuity would count just as much against him. What did he have to do to appear as normal as he needed to be, as he had once thought he was?

  The witnesses for the prosecution all arose to testify against Reed like the spirits from Virgil’s world of the dead. Though they were still alive, they seemed more like spirits to him: insubstantial, unreal. The woman from the bridge identified him as the shifty-looking person who had asked her what time the schools came out; the Indian waiter and the landlord of the pub told how agitated Reed had looked and acted that evening; other people had spotted him in the street, apparently following the murdered girl and her friend. Mr. Hakim was there to tell the court what kind of videos Reed had rented lately—including School’s Out—and even Bill told how his colleague used to make remarks about the schoolgirls passing by: “You know, he’d get all excited about glimpsing a bit of black knicker when the wind blew their skirts up. It just seemed like a bit of a lark. I thought nothing of it at the time.” Then he shrugged and gave Reed a pitying look. And as if all that weren’t enough, there was Maggie, a shabby Dido, refusing to look at him as she told the court of the way he had abused and abandoned her.

  Toward the end of the prosecution case, even Reed’s barrister was beginning to look depressed. He did his best in cross-examination, but the damnedest thing was that they were all telling the truth, or their versions of it. Yes, Mr. Hakim admitted, other people had rented the same videos. Yes, he might have even watched some of them himself. But the fact remained that the man on trial was Terence J. Reed, and Reed had recently rented a video called School’s Out, the kind of thing, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that you wouldn’t want to find your husbands or sons watching.

  Reed could understand members of the victim’s community appearing against him, and he could even comprehend Maggie’s hurt pride. But why Hakim and Bill? What had he ever done to them? Had they never really liked him? It went on and on, a nightmare of distorted truth. Reed felt as if he had been set up in front of a funfair mirror, and all the jurors could see was his warped and twisted reflection. I’m innocent, he kept telling himself as he gripped the rail, but his knuckles turned whiter and whiter and his voice grew fainter and fainter.

&nbs
p; Hadn’t Bill joined in the remarks about schoolgirls? Wasn’t it all in the spirit of fun? Yes, of course. But Bill wasn’t in the dock. It was Terence J. Reed who stood accused of killing an innocent fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. He had been in the right place at the right time, and he had passed remarks on the budding breasts and milky thighs of the girls who had crossed the road in front of their office every day.

  Then, the morning before the defense case was about to open—Reed himself was set to go into the dock, and not at all sure by now what the truth was—a strange thing happened.

  Bentley and Rodmoor came softly into the courtroom, tiptoed up to the judge, and began to whisper. Then the judge appeared to ask them questions. They nodded. Rodmoor looked in Reed’s direction. After a few minutes of this, the two men took seats and the judge made a motion for the dismissal of all charges against the accused. Pandemonium broke out in court: reporters dashed for phones and the spectators’ gallery buzzed with speculation. Amid it all, Terry Reed got to his feet, realized what had happened, if not how, and promptly collapsed.

  * * *

  Nervous exhaustion, the doctor said, and not surprising after the ordeal Reed had been through. Complete rest was the only cure.

  When Reed felt well enough, a few days after the trial had ended in uproar, his solicitor dropped by to tell him what had happened. Apparently, another schoolgirl had been assaulted in the same area, only this one had proved more than a match for her attacker. She had fought tooth and nail to hang on to her life, and in doing so had managed to pick up a half brick and crack the man’s skull with it. He hadn’t been seriously injured, but he’d been unconscious long enough for the girl to get help. When he was arrested, the man had confessed to the murder of Debbie Harrison. He had known details not revealed in the papers. After a nightlong interrogation, police officers had no doubt whatsoever that he was telling the truth. Which meant Reed couldn’t possibly be guilty. Hence motion for dismissal, end of trial. Reed was a free man again.

  He stayed at home for three weeks, hardly venturing out of the house except for food, and even then he always went farther afield for it than Hakim’s. His neighbors watched him walk by, their faces pinched with disapproval, as if he were some kind of monster in their midst. He almost expected them to get up a petition to force him out of his home.

  During that time he heard not one word of apology from the undertaker and the Bible salesman; Francis still had “stuff to do . . . things to organize”; and Camille’s answering machine seemed permanently switched on.

  At night Reed suffered claustrophobic nightmares of prison. He couldn’t sleep well and even the mild sleeping pills the doctor gave him didn’t really help. The bags grew heavier and darker under his eyes. Some days he wandered the city in a dream, not knowing where he was going, or, when he got there, how he had arrived.

  The only thing that sustained him, the only pure, innocent, untarnished thing in his entire life, was when Debbie Harrison visited him in his dreams. She was alive then, just as she had been when he saw her for the first and only time, and he felt no desire to rob her of her innocence, only to partake of it himself. She smelled of apples in autumn and everything they saw and did together became a source of pure wonder. When she smiled, his heart almost broke with joy.

  At the end of the third week, Reed trimmed his beard, got out his suit, and went in to work. In the office he was met with an embarrassed silence from Bill and a redundancy check from Frank, who thrust it at him without a word of explanation. Reed shrugged, pocketed the check, and left.

  Every time he went into town, strangers stared at him in the street and whispered about him in pubs. Mothers held more tightly on to their daughters’ hands when he passed them by in the shopping centers. He seemed to have become quite a celebrity in his hometown. At first, he couldn’t think why, then one day he plucked up the courage to visit the library and look up the newspapers that had been published during his trial.

  What he found was total character annihilation, nothing less. When the headline about the capture of the real killer came out, it could have made no difference at all; the damage had already been done to Reed’s reputation, and it was permanent. He might have been found innocent of the girl’s murder, but he had been found guilty, too, guilty of being a sick consumer of pornography, of being obsessed with young girls, unable to get it up without the aid of a struggle on the part of the female. None of it was true, of course, but somehow that didn’t matter. It had been made so. As it is written, so let it be. And to cap it all, his photograph had appeared almost every day, both with and without the beard. There could be very few people in England who would fail to recognize him in the street.

  Reed stumbled outside into the hazy afternoon. It was warming up toward spring, but the air was moist and gray with rain so fine it was closer to mist. The pubs were still open, so he dropped by the nearest one and ordered a double Scotch. The other customers looked at him suspiciously as he sat hunched in his corner, eyes bloodshot and puffy from lack of sleep, gaze directed sharply inward.

  Standing on the bridge in the misty rain an hour later, Reed couldn’t remember making the actual decision to throw himself over the side, but he knew that was what he had to do. He couldn’t even remember how he had ended up on this particular bridge, or the route he’d taken from the pub. He had thought, drinking his third double Scotch, that maybe he should go away and rebuild his life, perhaps abroad. But that didn’t ring true as a solution. Life is what you have to live with, what you are, and now his life was what it had become, or what it had been turned into. It was what being in the wrong place at the wrong time had made it, and that was what he had to live with. The problem was he couldn’t live with it; therefore, he had to die.

  He couldn’t actually see the river below—everything was gray—but he knew it was there. The River Eden, it was called. Reed laughed harshly to himself. It wasn’t his fault that the river that runs through Carlisle is called the Eden, he thought; it was just one of life’s little ironies.

  Twenty-five to four on a wet Wednesday afternoon. Nobody about. Now was as good a time as any.

  Just as he was about to climb onto the parapet, a figure emerged from the mist. It was the first girl on her way home from school. Her gray pleated skirt swished around her long, slim legs, and her socks hung over her ankles. Under her green blazer, the misty rain had wet the top of her white blouse so much that it stuck to her chest. Reed gazed at her in awe. Her long blond hair had darkened and curled in the rain, sticking in strands over her cheek. There were tears in his eyes. He moved away from the parapet.

  As she neared him, she smiled shyly.

  Innocence.

  Reed stood before her in the mist and held his hands out, crying like a baby.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Murder in Utopia

  I had just finished cauterizing the stump of Ezekiel Metcalfe’s left arm, which I had had to amputate after it was shredded in one of the combing machines, when young Billy Ratcliffe came running in to tell me that a man had fallen over the weir.

  Believing my medical skills might be required, I left my assistant, Benjamin, to take care of Ezekiel and tried to keep up with young Billy as he led me down Victoria Road at a breakneck pace. I was not an old man at that time, but I fear I had led a rather sedentary life, and I was panting by the time we passed the allotment gardens in front of the mill. A little more slowly now, we crossed the railway lines and the canal before arriving at the cast-iron bridge that spanned the River Aire.

  Several men had gathered on the bridge, and they were looking down into the water, some of them pointing at a dark shape that seemed to bob and twist in the current. As soon as I got my first look at the scene, I knew that none of my skills would be of any use to the poor soul, whose coat had snagged on a tree root poking out from the riverbank.

  “Did anyone see him fall?” I asked.

  They all shook their heads. I picked a couple of stout lads and led them down through
the bushes to the riverbank. With a little maneuvering, they were able to lie on their bellies and reach over the shallow edge to grab hold of an arm each. Slowly they raised the dripping body from the water.

  When they had completed their task, a gasp arose from the crowd on the bridge. Though his white face was badly marked with cuts and bruises, there could be hardly a person present who didn’t recognize Richard Ellerby, one of Sir Titus Salt’s chief wool buyers.

  * * *

  Saltaire, where the events of which I am about to speak occurred in the spring of 1873, was then a “model” village, a mill workers’ Utopia of some four or five thousand souls, built by Sir Titus Salt in the valley of the River Aire between Leeds and Bradford. The village, laid out in a simple grid system, still stands, looking much the same as it did then, across the railway lines a little to the southwest of the colossal, six-story woolen mill to which it owes its existence.

  As there was no crime in Utopia, no police force was required, and we relied on constables from nearby townships in the unlikely event that any real unpleasantness or unrest should arise. There was certainly no reason to suspect foul play in Richard Ellerby’s death, but legal procedures must be followed in all cases where the circumstances of death are not immediately apparent.

  My name is Dr. William Oulton, and I was then employed by the Saltaire hospital both as a physician and as a scientist, conducting research into the link between raw wool and anthrax. I also acted as coroner; therefore, I took it as my responsibility to inquire into the facts of Richard Ellerby’s death.

  In this case, I also had a personal interest, as the deceased was a close acquaintance of mine, and I had dined with him and his charming wife, Caroline, on a number of occasions. Richard and I both belonged to the Saltaire Institute—Sir Titus’s enlightened alternative to the evils of public houses—and we often attended chamber-music concerts there together, played a game of billiards, or relaxed in the smoking room, where we had on occasion discussed the possible health problems associated with importing wool. I wouldn’t say I knew Richard well—he was, in many ways, reserved and private in my company—but I knew him to be an honest and industrious man who believed wholeheartedly in Sir Titus’s vision.