The First Cut

by Peter Robinson

  She finished her coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. It was eleven o’clock already. Now that she had fulfilled the main part of her purpose here, time was beginning to hang heavy; all she could do was wait, a much more passive activity than searching and planning.

  To kill time until lunch, she found herself again mounting the 199 steps to St. Mary’s and the abbey ruins. There were even more people about this time: children racing one another to the top, counting out loud as they did so—“Eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six…”—old folk in elastic stockings, wheezing as they went, dogs with their tongues hanging out running back and forth as if they didn’t know up from down.

  Martha climbed steadily, counting under her breath. Again, it came to 199, though legend said it was hard to get the same figure twice. At the top stood Caedmon’s Cross, a thin twenty-foot upright length of stone, tapering toward the top, where a small cross was mounted. The length of it was carved with medieval figures—David, Hilda and Caedmon himself—like some sort of stone totem pole, and at the bottom was the inscription, “To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English sacred song fell asleep hard by 680.” Martha knew it wasn’t that old, though; it had been carved and erected in 1898, not in the real Caedmon’s time. But it still had power. She particularly loved the understated simplicity of “fell asleep hard by.” When she had to die, that was the way she would like to go. Again, she thought of Jack Grimley and shivered as if someone had just walked across her grave.

  Getting her breath back after the long climb—it came less easily since she had started smoking—she paused in the graveyard and looked at the town spread out beyond and below the cross. She could easily pick out the dark, monolithic tower of St. Hilda’s at the top of her street, and the stately row of white four-story hotels at the cliff-side end of East Terrace. She could see the whale’s jawbone, too, that entry to another world. The rough, sandy gravestones, with their burnt-looking knobbly tops, stood in the foreground; the trick of perspective made them look even bigger than the houses over the harbor.

  Martha turned and wandered into the church again. A recorded lecture was in progress in the vestry. It sounded tinny from constant playing. She found herself drifting almost unconsciously toward the front of the church, where, below the tall, ornate pulpit she slipped into the box marked FOR STRANGERS ONLY. It was the same one she’d been in before, and again she felt that sense of luxurious isolation and well-being. Even the sounds of the tourists in the church, with their whispered comments and clicking cameras, were barely audible now. In the hush, she ran her fingertips over the green baize and knelt on a red patterned cushion. There, cut off from the rest of the world, she offered up a prayer of a kind.

  24

  Kirsten

  Kirsten lay in bed late the next morning. Outside her window the birds sang and twittered in the trees and the village went about its business. Not that there was much of that. Occasionally, she could hear the whirr of bicycle wheels passing by, and once in a while the thrum of a delivery van’s engine.

  She put the empty coffee cup back on the tray—breakfast in bed, her mother’s idea—and went to open the curtains. Sunlight burst through, catching the cloud of dust motes that swirled in the air. It’s all dead skin, Kirsten thought, wondering where on earth she’d heard that. Probably one of those educational television programs, science for the masses. She opened the window and warm air rushed to greet her, carrying the heavy scent of honeysuckle. A fat bee droned around the opening, then seemed to decide there was nothing for him in there and meandered down to the garden instead.

  Kirsten’s room reflected just about every stage of her transition from child to worldly student of language and literature. Even her teddy bear sat on the dressing table, propped against the wall. Stretching, she wandered around touching things, her feet sinking deep into the wall-to-wall carpet. The walls and ceiling were painted a kind of sea green, or was it blue? It really depended on the light, Kirsten decided. Those greeny blue colors often looked much the same to her: turquoise, cerulean, azure, ultramarine. But today, with the light shimmering on it as on ripples in the ocean, it was definitely the color of the Mediterranean she remembered from family visits to the Riviera. The walls seemed to swirl and eddy like the water in a Hockney swimming-pool painting. When Kirsten stood in the middle of the room, she felt as if she were floating in a cave of water, or frozen at its center like a flower in a glass paperweight.

  It was two rooms, really. The bed itself, with a three-quarter-size mattress far too soft for Kirsten’s taste, was set in a little recess up a stair from the large main room, just below the small window. Also tucked away in there were the dresser and wall cupboards for her clothes. Down the step was the spacious study-cum-sitting-room. Her desk stood at a right angle to the picture window, so that she could simply turn her head and look out at the round, green Mendips as she worked. There, she had written essays during her summer vacations and made notes as she read ahead for the following term.

  Above the desk, her father had fixed a few bookshelves to the wall on brackets. Apart from some old childhood favorites, like Black Beauty, The Secret Garden, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a few Enid Blytons—Famous Five, Secret Seven—most of the books were to do with her university courses. They were either for subjects she had studied over the past three years, brought home to save space in her bedsit, or books she had bought secondhand, usually in Bath, for courses she had intended to take in the future. Like the ones on medieval history and literature—including Bede’s An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing. But Kirsten had never taken that course. Instead, she had chosen at the last moment special tutorials on Coleridge with a visiting world expert in the field, an American academic who had turned out to be a crashing bore far more interested in trying to look up the front-row women’s skirts than in the wisdom of Biographia Literaria.

  By the side of the shelves was a corkboard, still spiked with old postcards from friends visiting Kenya, Nepal or Finland, photos of her with Sarah and Galen, and poems she had clipped from the TLS. There were no posters of pop stars in the room. She had taken them all down last year, thinking herself far too mature for such things. The only work of art that enhanced her wall was a superb Monet print, which looked wonderfully alive in the sunlight that rippled over it.

  She also had an armchair with a footrest, for reading in, and the expensive stereo system. Her records were mostly a mixture of popular classics—Beethoven’s Ninth, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique (which she had bought after seeing Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers at the University Film Society) and the soundtrack of Amadeus—and a few dated pop albums: Rolling Stones, Wham!, U2, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Tom Waits. She wasn’t interested in any of these now, and had a hard time choosing the music she wanted to listen to. Finally, she settled for the Pathétique, and dressed as the music swelled and surged from its slow and quiet beginning.

  But she couldn’t stand it. As soon as the lush romantic theme came in, she snatched the needle from the turntable, scratching the record’s surface as she did so. The burning pain in her loins had receded, but she had a headache that made music difficult to bear. She was sure it was caused by that dark mass lodged in her mind. If she closed her eyes, she could even see it, a globe blacker than the rest of the darkness behind her eyes: a black hole, perhaps, that sucked everything in and turned it inside out; or the beginning of an emotional or spiritual cancer about to spread through her whole being.

  Kirsten sat down cross-legged on the carpet, holding her head in her hands. With the music gone, she could hear the birds again. Someone called a greeting out in the lane. She could even hear her mother pottering around downstairs.

  It was after ten o’clock and such a beautiful day outside that she felt she ought to go for a walk. Any other day, she would have been up before breakfast and down to the woods at the back of the house for a leisurely stroll under
the light-dappled leaves. Not today, though. After ten and she still had no idea what to do with herself.

  She tried to look ahead into the future, but it was all darkness. Before that night in the park, she had never really given it a thought. Somehow, she had always believed, the future would take care of itself and would be just as privileged, as bright and exciting as the past. But now she had no idea what to do with her life. Whenever she thought of such things her head began to ache even more, as if the bubble were growing inside it and pushing at the inside of her skull. She couldn’t concentrate well enough to read a book. She couldn’t bear to listen to music. What the hell was she supposed to do? She put her fists to her temples and tensed up. The headache was pounding inside her. She wanted to scream. She wanted to crack open her skull and claw her brain out with her finger-nails.

  But the rage and the pain ebbed away. Slowly, she got to her feet and walked up the step to the bedroom. There, she took her clothes off again, dry-swallowed three prescription analgesics and crawled back into bed.

  25

  Martha

  Saturday brought Martha two important pieces of news: one that she had been expecting, and another that changed everything.

  The day started as usual with a wink from the old man and a glare from his wife at breakfast. Martha wasn’t very hungry, so she skipped the cereal and just picked at her bacon and eggs. She was wondering whether to move out that day and find somewhere else in another part of the town. It seemed a good idea. People were getting far too used to her here, and there might come a time when awkward questions would be asked.

  After breakfast, she went back up to her room and packed her gear in the holdall. She had one last smoke there, leaning on the windowsill and looking left and right, from the close and overbearing St. Hilda’s to the distant St. Mary’s. It was the first overcast day in the entire week. A chill wind had blown in off the North Sea, bringing the scent of rain with it. Already a light drizzle was falling, like a thin mist enveloping the town. Visibility was poor, and St. Mary’s looked like the blurred gray ghost of a church on top of its hill.

  After checking the room once more to make sure she had forgotten nothing, Martha padded downstairs and found the proprietor helping his wife carry the dirty dishes through to the kitchen.

  “I’d like to settle up now, if that’s all right,” she said.

  “Fine.” He wiped his hands on the grubby white apron he was wearing. “I’ll make out the bill.”

  Martha waited in the hallway. The usual flyers about Whitby’s scenic attractions, restaurants and entertainments lay on the polished wood table by the registration book. On the wall above was a mirror. Martha examined herself. What she had done hadn’t changed her appearance. She looked no different from when she had arrived: same too-thin lips, tilted nose and almond eyes, the same untidy cap of light brown hair. All she needed was pointed ears, she thought, and she might be able to pass for a Vulcan.

  “Here you are.” The man eyed her with amusement as he handed over the bill. Martha checked the total and pulled the correct amount from her wallet.

  “Cash?” He seemed surprised.

  “That’s right.” She didn’t want to use checks or credit cards; they could be too easily traced. She had cashed her father’s check and emptied her bank account before she set off for Whitby, so she had quite a bit of money—not all of it so obviously bulging out of her wallet, but hidden away in the holdall’s “secret” pockets.

  “I suppose you’ll need a receipt?”

  For a second she was puzzled. Why would she want a receipt?

  “For tax purposes,” he went on.

  “Oh. Yes, please.”

  “Hang on.”

  Tax purposes? Of course! She was supposed to be a writer here to do research. She could deduct her expenses from her income tax. She was slipping, forgetting the details.

  The man returned and handed her a slip of paper. “I hope the book’s a success,” he said. “Certainly plenty of atmosphere in Whitby. I don’t read romances myself, but the wife does. We’ll look out for it.”

  “Yes, please do,” Martha said. She wanted to tell him it was an academic, historical work, but somehow that just didn’t seem important now. It was all lies anyway: romance or history, what did it matter? “Thank you very much,” she said, and walked out of the door.

  It really was cool outside. She had been intending to carry the quilted jacket over her arm, but she put it on instead as she set off on her usual morning trek to the Monk’s Haven. She wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of the day. Maybe go up to St. Mary’s again and shut herself in the box pew. She hadn’t felt as safe and secure in years as she had the previous day up there. And then she would have to find another B&B to stay at.

  The rain smelled of dead fish and seaweed. Browsers on Silver Street and Flowergate wore plastic macs or carried brollies, and fathers held on to their children’s hands. Martha thought that was odd. When the sun shone, everyone seemed more relaxed and the children ran free, swinging their buckets and spades, dancing along the pavement and bumping into people. But as soon as it rained, pedestrians drew in and held on tight to one another. It was probably some primordial fear, she decided, a throwback to primitive instinct. They weren’t aware they were doing it. After all, man was just another species of animal, despite all his inflated ideas about his place in the great chain of being. People had no idea at all why they behaved the way they did. Most of the time they were merely victims of forces beyond their control and comprehension, just as she had been.

  You could only depend on reason and organization to a certain degree, Martha had discovered, and beyond that point lived monsters. Sometimes you had to cross the boundary and live with the monsters for a while. Sometimes you had no choice.

  At her usual newsagent’s on the corner just past the bridge, she bought a local paper and the Independent and headed for warmth, coffee and a cigarette.

  First, she picked up the local paper and found what she was looking for on the front page. It wasn’t much, just a small paragraph tucked away near the bottom, but it was the seed from which a bigger story would soon grow. BODY WASHED UP NEAR SANDSEND, the small-caps headline ran. Sandsend was only about four miles away. That was better than she’d hoped for. She thought it would have been carried further than four miles, and such an event might not seem so important in a large town like Scarborough. She read on:

  The body of a man was discovered by a young couple on an isolated stretch of beach near Sandsend last night. So far, police say, the man has not been identified. Chief Superintendent Charles Kallen has asked anyone with information about a missing person to come forward and contact the police immediately. Time of death is estimated at no earlier than Thursday, and the body appears to have been drifting in the sea since then. Police had no comment to make about the cause of death.

  They didn’t know very much. Or if they did, they weren’t saying. Martha would have thought it was obvious how the man had met his death. But the sea did strange things, she reminded herself. The police would probably think that his head injuries had been caused by rocks. The forensic people were clever, though, and they would soon discover at a postmortem examination what had really happened.

  A little disappointed at the thinness of the story, Martha ordered another black coffee and lit her third cigarette of the day. Should she stay in town until the real news broke? she wondered. This story just seemed so flat and anticlimactic. She should hang on at least until he was identified. On the other hand, that news would make the national dailies, which she could read anywhere. No, it was best to stay. Stick close to the action. She had gone so far that it would be futile to pull out now.

  Next she turned to the Independent. She didn’t expect to read anything about the discovery of Grimley’s body there, but she looked just the same. At the bottom of the second page, tucked away like a mad relation in a cellar, was a short paragraph that caught her eye. It appeared under the simple heading, ANOTHER
BODY FOUND. Perhaps that was it. Martha folded the paper and read on.

  Police last night say they found the body of a nineteen-year-old female on a stretch of waste ground near the University of Sheffield. Evidence suggests that the girl, a student at the university, was killed shortly after dark on Friday evening. Detective Superintendent Elswick, in charge of the field investigation, told reporters that evidence indicates the unnamed woman is the sixth victim of the killer who has come to be called the “Student Slasher.” All his victims have been female students at northern universities. Police refused to reveal the exact nature of the girl’s injuries. The killer has been operating in the north for over a year now, and there has been much criticism of the police’s handling of the investigation. When asked why the killer hadn’t been caught yet, Superintendent Elswick declined to comment.

  Martha felt herself grow cold. The conversations going on around her turned to a meaningless background hum. All she could hear clearly was the litany of names running through her mind: Margaret Snell, Kathleen Shannon, Jane Pitcombe, Kim Waterford, Jill Sarsden. And now another, name unknown. Hands shaking, she lit another cigarette from the stub of her old one and read the article again. It said exactly the same, word for word. The “Student Slasher” had struck again. She had been mistaken in Grimley. She had killed the wrong man.

  Choking back the vomit, she crushed out her cigarette, rushed to the tiny toilet and locked the door behind her. After bringing up her breakfast, she splashed icy water on her face and leaned against the sink breathing fast and deep. She still felt dizzy. Everything was spinning around her as if she was standing on a high balcony suffering from vertigo. Her skin felt cold and clammy; her mouth tasted dry and sour. She took a deep breath and held it. Another. Another. Her pulse began to steady.