The First Cut

by Peter Robinson

  “No. When it’s not me in the office, it’s someone else, isn’t it? And she’s probably just the same with them. It’s nothing special; it’s impersonal, like the police.” And she told Sarah about finally seeing her attacker.

  “How old do you think he was?” Sarah asked.

  “I never really thought. About forty, forty-five, I suppose. Pretty old. It’s just that he had this lined face, you know, rough-hewn, like, lines from the edges of the nose and the mouth.” She drew them with her fingers on her own face, then she shuddered. “It was awful, Sarah. It was like going through the whole thing again, but I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Laura brought me out of it.”

  “Did you tell the police what he looked like?”

  Kirsten sipped some Scotch and glanced toward the bar. Things were coming into clearer focus now; her feet were touching the ground.

  “Not yet. Laura’s going to phone them and send a report.”

  “Are you sure you’re telling me everything?” Sarah asked.

  “Why?”

  “You sound vague, and you’ve got that shifty look on your face. I’ve known you long enough to tell when you’re holding something back. What is it?”

  Kirsten paused and swirled her drink in her glass before answering. “There was something else…just an impression. I can’t really be sure.”

  “What was it?”

  “When he put the gag in my mouth, I was too busy struggling, trying to catch my breath, to really notice at the time.”

  “Notice what?”

  “The smell. There was a smell of fish. You know, like at the seaside.”

  “Fish?”

  Kirsten nodded. “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t remember it until I’d left her office, when I was coming here to meet you.”

  “Why don’t you phone her?”

  Kirsten shrugged. “Like I said, it’s probably not important.”

  “But that’s not for you to decide.”

  Kirsten toyed with her cigarette in the large blue ashtray, shaping the end in one of its grooves. She felt herself starting to drift again like the smoke that curled and twisted in front of her. “I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems that I keep feeding them bits of my memory, you know, things I’ve had sweated out of me, and nothing happens. They’re so impersonal, just a big bureaucratic machine. I mean, two more girls have been killed since my…two. I can’t explain myself, Sarah, not yet, but it’s me and him. I feel I’ve got it in me to find him. It’s as if he’s inside me and I’m the only one who can flush him out.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jesus Christ! Kirstie. If you ask me you’re turning a bit batty. It must be all that solitude and country air.” She put her hand on Kirsten’s arm again. “You really should tell the police everything you can remember. Like you said, he’s killed two women already, and there’s bound to be more. People like him don’t stop till they’re caught, you know.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that,” said Kirsten, pulling her arm away angrily. “Do you think I don’t feel for those women? I have to live what they died.”

  “Come again?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry if I seem so touchy about it. I can’t explain. I’m not even sure what I mean myself.”

  Kirsten sipped some more Scotch and looked around the pub again. The people looked indistinct; their conversations were just meaningless sounds. Sarah changed the subject to shopping.

  As she half-listened and let herself be lulled by the buzz of talk around her, Kirsten came to a decision. People didn’t understand her, it seemed. Not even Sarah. People didn’t understand how personal it was. Not just for her, but for Margaret Snell and Kathleen Shannon too. Doctors, police…what did they know? In the future, she would have to be careful just how much she told them.

  When she tasted that foul rag he had stuffed in her mouth and smelled his rough stubby fingers, she recognized the salt-water taste as well as the fishy odor. The rag tasted as if it had been dipped in the sea. Wasn’t there, then, a good chance that he had come from a coastal town?

  And there was something else. Not only had she remembered the smell, but when he had thrown her to the ground and put the rag in her mouth as she stared up at him in the moonlight, his mouth had been moving. He had been talking to her. She couldn’t hear any sounds or words, but she knew he had spoken, and if she could bring that back, there was no knowing what it might tell her about him. It might even lead her to him.

  39

  Susan

  As Susan approached the Brown Cow at lunchtime on the third day, she saw two white factory vans parked in front, and before she had even got near the entrance, two men came out of the pub and walked over to them. It was impossible to be sure from such a distance, but one of them matched the image in her memory: low, dark fringe, the thick eyebrows meeting in the middle. She had to get closer to see if he had deep lines on his face and, most of all, she needed to hear his voice.

  When they started their vans and pulled out, she followed on foot. At least she could see which way they turned as they drove down the lane. If they went left, they would be on their way to the factory, and if they carried on down to the main road, they would be off making a delivery somewhere. She was in luck. They turned left.

  Sue hurried after them. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but there was no point in hanging around the Brown Cow any longer. When she reached the turning, the vans had already pulled up outside the loading bays a hundred yards beyond the mesh gates, and the drivers were nowhere in sight. She walked along the street as far as the row of shops. She couldn’t just wander through the factory gates and go looking for the man; nor could she sit in the café where the inquisitive woman would be on duty. What could she do?

  Before she had time to come up with a plan, she noticed the man walk out of the glass doors of the office building. He seemed to be slipping a small envelope of some kind into his pocket. A pay packet, perhaps? Whatever it was, he looked as though he had finished for the day. If he was a driver, the odds were that he had just returned from an overnight run, padded his time sheet with an hour or so at the Brown Cow, and was now on his way home.

  He was walking toward her, only about forty yards away now on the dirt track that led out of the factory. She had nowhere to hide. She couldn’t just stand there in the street until he came level with her. What if he recognized her? She had changed a lot since their last meeting, lost a lot of weight, though her wig was about the same length as her hair had been then. Surely he couldn’t have got a much clearer impression of her looks than she had of his? But she couldn’t stand rooted to the spot.

  There was only one thing to do. She rushed forward and ducked into the newsagent’s. She needed her morning papers anyway, as she had been so absorbed in her new routine that she hadn’t even spent her usual hour in the Church Street café. She hadn’t looked for news of Keith, and she was still feeling nervous about the Grimley investigation, though no one had knocked on her door in the middle of the night yet.

  The newspapers were arranged in small, overlapping piles on a low shelf just inside the window, below the rack of magazines. From there, as she pretended to make her selection with her back turned to the newsagent, she could get a closer look at the man as he went past. She bent and pretended to leaf through the stack, as if she were scanning the front pages for the best headlines, when suddenly he appeared right outside. He didn’t walk past as she had expected. Instead, he patted his pocket, turned and came inside.

  Sue kept her back to the counter and examined the Radio Times and Women’s Own in the rack above the papers.

  “Afternoon, Greg,” she heard the woman say. “In for some baccy, I suppose?”

&n
bsp; “Yes, please.” The man’s voice sounded muffled and Sue couldn’t hear him clearly.

  “Usual?”

  “Aye. Oh, and I’ll have a box of matches, too, please, love. Swan Vestas.”

  “Finished for the day?”

  “Aye. Just got back from the Leeds and Bradford run. Can’t leave the poor beggars without their fish and chips, can we?”

  The newsagent laughed.

  Sue gripped the rack of magazines to keep herself from falling over. Her heart was beating so fast and loud that she thought it would burst. At the very least, both the newsagent and the man in the shop must be able to hear it. Her face was flushed and her breath was hard to catch. Everything seemed to swim and ripple in front of her eyes like motes dancing in rays of light: the magazine covers, the grim terraced houses across the street. And all the while she struggled to stay on her feet; she couldn’t let these two people see that there was anything wrong with her. They would rush over to help, and then…

  Sue held on and fought for control as the voice, the horrible, familiar voice that had been whispering hoarsely in her nightmares for a month, carried on making small talk as if nothing terrible had ever happened.

  40

  Kirsten

  When Kirsten stood on the platform and watched the Intercity pull out at 12:25 on January 3, she felt frightened and desolate. Despite an awkward beginning, Christmas at Brierley Coombe that year had turned out to be the best time she had enjoyed since the assault. She had been glad to have Sarah around, especially as a counter to all the uncles, aunts and grandparents who had treated her as if she were a half-witted invalid.

  The village itself looked like a Christmas-card illustration. The snow that began on December 22 went on for almost two days and settled a treat, particularly out in the country, where there was little traffic and no industry to spoil it. It lay about two feet thick on the thatched roofs, smooth and contoured around the eaves and gables; and in the woods, where Kirsten often took Sarah for early-morning walks, the snow that rested on twigs and branches created an image of two worlds in stark contrast, the white superimposed on the dark.

  They went into Bath once more to do some shopping at the Boxing Day sales and have drinks with Laura Henderson, whom Sarah liked immediately. Also, one night they shocked the locals in the village pub. Sarah wore her FISH ON A BICYCLE T-shirt, and everyone looked embarrassed. There she was: the careless tangle of blond hair, the pale complexion and exquisite features that looked as if they had been expertly worked from the finest porcelain, then smoothed and polished to perfection, and, to cap it all, that great advertisement for the redundancy of the male sex scrawled across her chest.

  Nobody bothered them, like the Lancashire lads in Bath had, but the village men glanced over and muttered nervously among themselves, some of them smiling superciliously. It was the most uncomfortable evening of the holiday for Kirsten. Her enjoyment of crowded pubs didn’t seem to have lasted long. She could relax with Laura and Sarah, but the proximity of men still made her tense and angry. And when they looked over with those superior smiles on their faces, her cheeks burned with fear and anger. After all, a man had taken what other men wanted from her. Somehow, she reasoned, they were all implicated in that.

  On New Year’s Eve, Kirsten’s parents went to a party. Kirsten and Sarah were invited, but neither of them fancied spending the evening with a bunch of drunken old stockbrokers, their bored wives and Yuppie offspring, so they decided to stay at home and celebrate by themselves.

  The cocktail cabinet was well stocked, a log fire blazed in the hearth and they turned out the lights and lit candles instead. The open curtains of the French windows revealed the snow-covered garden and trees. Kirsten brought some of her records and tapes down from her room to play on her father’s stereo, and everything seemed perfect. They sat on the thick rug in front of the spitting fire, listening to Mozart, with the cognac bottle beside them.

  “What are you going to do?” Sarah asked as she poured out their second drinks.

  “With my life, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t made any plans.”

  “You can’t just stay here forever, you know.” Sarah looked around the room, where the candles and fire tossed shadows like dark sails in a storm, and out of the windows at the fairy-tale garden in the snow. “Nice as it is, it isn’t real life. Not yours.”

  “And what is my life?”

  “For Christ’s sake, you got a First, a good one. You’re not going to waste your education, are you?”

  Kirsten laughed. “Listen to yourself. You sound like a bloody guidance counselor or something.”

  Sarah bit her lip and looked away.

  “I’m sorry.” Kirsten reached out and touched her shoulder. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I haven’t thought about it. I suppose I’ve put the future off and I resent being made to dwell on it.”

  “Why don’t you go back to university, do your MA? It needn’t be up north if you don’t want. There’s plenty of other places would be glad to have you.”

  Kirsten nodded slowly. “I won’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind. But I couldn’t start till the next academic year. What would I do in the meantime?”

  Sarah laughed. “How the hell should I know? What do you think I am, a guidance counselor? But seriously, you could get a job, something in Bath. Just to keep you going and take you out of yourself. You’ve got too much time to brood on the past hanging around this village. What about a bookshop, for example? You’d probably like that.”

  “But what would my mother think?” She put on a finishing-school accent: “I mean, it’s awfully common being a shopgirl, dear.”

  Sarah laughed. “Is that why she’s so frosty toward me? Maybe I should tell her my father owns half of Herefordshire. Think that would help?”

  “I’m sure it would. She’s such a snob.”

  “Seriously though, Kirstie, you’ve got to do something, get out of here. What about Toronto? You could go out there and join Galen.”

  Kirsten topped up both their drinks. It was eleven thirty. Mozart’s Requiem had just ended and the world outside was silent and still.

  “Well?” Sarah repeated. “What about it? Or is it over between you?”

  Kirsten stared into the fire. Flames licked the wood like angry tongues. If I don’t tell her now, she thought, I probably never will. She looked at Sarah, so lovely in the winter firelight with red and orange and yellow flames dancing in her eyes and flickering over her face. Her skin looked almost transparent, especially where the fire seemed to shine a delicate coral through her nostrils and over her cheekbones. And she had it all: not just the looks, but a whole body. She could make love and have orgasms and have children.

  “What is it?” Sarah asked softly.

  Kirsten realized that a tear had trickled from the corner of one eye. Quickly, she wiped it away. She would have to stop this crying business. Once was all right, it had helped drain her of tension, but it mustn’t become a habit, a weakness.

  Over another cigarette, she finally told Sarah all about the damage to her body. Sarah listened in horror and couldn’t find anything to say. She poured more cognac. They leaned back against the sofa, and Sarah put her arm around Kirsten and held her close. There were no more tears. They sat like that, content and silent for a while, sipping Rémy. Finally, Sarah swore softly: “Shit, it’s ten past twelve. We’ve forgotten the new year.”

  Kirsten looked up and the spell was broken. Her back ached from the position she’d been sitting in. “So it is. Never mind. I’ll get the Veuve Clicquot and we’ll have our own new year a bit late.” She stood up, rubbed her aching muscles and went into the kitchen.

  And so they had poured champagne, sung “Auld Lang Syne” and wished each other a Happy New Year at twenty past twelve.

  And now Sarah was gone. Kirsten walked aimlessly around Bath, its streets quiet with postseasonal depression, and thought over what Sarah had said abou
t the future. She decided that she would resume her studies, or at least apply for next year. It would be a good cover, and it would keep her parents off her back.

  In the meantime, she was going to attempt to find out who had crippled her. It might take months, she realized, but at least now she had discovered that the knowledge was there, locked inside her. Of course, she must take care that no one suspected what she was really up to; she had to appear as if she was simply getting on with her life and putting the past behind her. She didn’t know yet what she was going to do if she did discover anything, but she had to find the key, unlock the voice, and then…First, though, she had a lot of thinking and a lot of planning to do.

  41

  Susan

  By the time the man had left the newsagent’s, Sue had managed to get her breathing under control. She bought her papers and a packet of cigarettes, then walked back out into the drizzle.

  He had reached the end of the street and turned left, down the lane toward the water. Without really considering what she was going to do, Sue started following him. She half expected him to turn into the council estate, assuming that was where he lived, but he didn’t. Instead of walking right down to Church Street, however, he turned right along a narrow road that ran parallel to it.

  There were no houses on the right-hand side of the street, just a stretch of waste ground that sloped up to the southern edge of the council estate, almost hidden beyond the convex swell of the land. On the left stood a row of small, detached cottages. They were nothing much really—just red brick with slate roofs—but each had its own front and back gardens. Their rear windows would also look out over the harbor toward West Cliff, and a good view always costs money.

  Sue had tried to hang back a reasonable distance behind the man, and she didn’t think he had spotted her. Beyond the row of cottages lay another open tract of weeds and nettles, where the street itself petered out into a narrow dirt path that veered left, eventually to join Church Street by the Esk. It might be difficult to follow him over open land, Sue thought. Although she looked ordinary enough in her long navy-blue raincoat and hood, if he turned he might just recognize her from the shop. And then he would wonder what a tourist was doing following him through such an unattractive part of town.