The First Cut

by Peter Robinson

  It happened a week later. She had been taking herself further and further back from the attack and moving forward slowly. This time she started with her preparations for the evening: a long bath, the lemon-fresh scent of her clean comfortable clothes, the pleasant walk to the Ring O’Bells with Sarah. As usual, she drew back at the oily rag and the fishy smell, but this time she heard his voice. Not all the words—just fragments about a “dark one” and a “song of destruction”—but it was enough. With her training in linguistics and dialect, Kirsten could place the accent easily enough.

  When she came out of the light trance, her heart was thumping and she felt as if she had just been dropped into an icy bath. She breathed deeply, fully alert now, and poured herself a glass of water. The raspy voice still sounded clear in her mind. He was from Yorkshire. She couldn’t be certain, but she didn’t think he had a city accent or the broad speech of the Dales and the Pennine Moorlands. When she added this new knowledge to the salt smell of raw fish that had covered his fingers and palms, then she knew he was from the Yorkshire coast—a holiday resort or a fishing village perhaps. The more she thought about it, replayed the voice and remembered her lessons, the more sure she became.

  She jumped up and pulled down the old school atlas from her bookshelf. From what she could see, the coastline stretched from around Bridlington Bay in the south to near Redcar in the north. County boundaries were no sure guide, though, especially as they had been changed in the seventies. She didn’t think he was from as far north as Middlesbrough, where a Northum-brian strain subtly infused the local speech, but she would have to include the Humberside area as far south as the Humber estuary. That left more than a hundred miles of rugged coastline. It was useless, she thought. Even if she was right, she would never be able to find him in such a large area. She dropped the atlas on the floor and threw herself onto the bed.

  The next day, she tried the same self-hypnosis technique again, and again she heard the voice, the flat vowels and clipped consonants. She felt something about the words this time, something that rang a bell deep inside her mind. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t identify them. He had been reciting a poem or a song of some kind. She had read somewhere that such killers sometimes do that, talk while they work, often quoting fragments of the Bible. But she didn’t think it was from the Bible. He had said something about “leaving a feast” because someone had asked him to sing a song and he couldn’t. She knew the words; she had heard them before at some time in her studies, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember where.

  She slept badly that night, haunted by the fragmented speech and the raspy tone of his voice, but in the morning she felt no closer to her goal. She didn’t know how it could help, but she needed to know exactly what he had said. She had to think, to work at it. The source was old—certainly pre-Renaissance by the sound of it—and that probably meant something from medieval literature. People were always singing and attending feasts then. There was only one thing to do: read.

  And so she set to reading medieval literature on warm days in the garden: Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Piers Plowman, anthologies full of religious lyrics. She read them all to no avail. All she got for her pains was that awful feeling of trying to find a quotation you have on the tip of your tongue but can’t pin down, or the frustration of looking for a phrase in Shakespeare when you can’t even remember what play it comes from. Outwardly, Kirsten seemed fine, preparing to go back to university, optimistic about her future. She even told her parents that she was considering the restorative surgery that the doctor had mentioned might be possible. But inside she was seething with anger and frustration.

  One golden day in late August she sat out on the back lawn under the copper beech with hardly a breeze to stir her hair from her brow. She had given up on medieval literature as a source and gone back even further, to Anglo-Saxon, which she had studied in her first year. So far, she had read translations of Beowulf and “The Seafarer” and was now working her way through Bede’s An Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It was an old translation that she had bought in a secondhand bookshop, attracted by the worn blue binding, the gilded page edges, and a pleasantly musty smell that reminded her of the local library. Inside the flyleaf, in faded, copper-colored ink, was written, “To Reginald, with Love from Elizabeth, October 1939. May God go with you.”

  Despite the translator’s flowery language, the Venerable Bede came through as far more human to her than many of his austere colleagues in the early church, and she could picture him out on the lonely island of Lindisfarne poring over illuminated manuscripts as he suffered through a wild Northum-brian winter. About two-thirds of the way through the book, she came to the passage about England’s “first” poet, Caedmon, who had been unable to sing. Whenever the harp was passed around at dinners, and everyone was expected to contribute a song, Caedmon always stole away.

  One evening, after he left a feast to care for the horses in the stables, he had a vision in which a man came and spoke his name and asked him to sing. Caedmon protested, but the stranger paid no attention to his excuses. “Yet shall ye sing to me,” he insisted. When Caedmon asked what he should sing about, the man replied, “Praise ye Creation.” And Caedmon found his inspiration.

  There was no blinding flash of light, but as Kirsten read, the dark cloud that had lodged itself in her mind since the attack seemed to disperse. In addition to her own silent voice, she could hear another voice reading along with her a perversion of Bede’s words: “And, lo, I asked, Of what shall I sing? and the Dark One told me, Sing of Destruction.’ ” It was the story he had told her as he beat her and slashed at her in the park that night. The summer garden turned to mist around her like a place filmed through a greasy lens, and her book slipped onto the grass. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Afterimages of light and leaves danced before her eyelids, then the memories flowed back unbidden.

  She could see his face now, in shadow, with the moon over his shoulder catching one lined cheek, as he smeared the smell of fish all over her lips and nostrils. He stuffed a piece of oily rag in her mouth and it made her feel sick. Then he started slapping her, back and forth across her face, and talking in that raspy singsong voice about how he had left the Feast of Whores one night and had a vision of the Dark One, to whom he confessed his impotence. The Dark One, he said, gave him the power to sing to women. That’s what he was doing with his knife; he was singing to her, just like that old poet from his town, who had suddenly been blessed with the gift of poetry late in life.

  The images went on. She could easily recall every painful moment of consciousness now. But she held herself back and pulled out with a sharp gasp when the unbearable image of the knife blade flashing in moonlight took shape.

  When she had breathed in the warm air and run her fingers over the tree’s smooth bark to bring herself back to earth, she remembered that he had actually said, “just like the old poet from my town.” She could play the words back now as if they were on a tape inside her mind. She picked up the book and found that, according to Bede, Caedmon came from a place called Streanaeshalch. Of course, that would be the Anglo-Saxon name; Bede often used the Roman or Saxon names. Flipping through the index, Kirsten found it in no time: “Streanaeshalch: see Whitby.” So he came from Whitby. It made perfect sense. It all added up: the fishy smell, the accent and now the reference to Caedmon, poet of his town.

  He had had no reason to assume that Kirsten would survive the attack; her continued existence had not been his intention. Hadn’t Superintendent Elswick said something about his trying to get to her at the hospital, too? That must have been because he was worried that she might remember what he had said in his ritual chant. And as time went by and nothing happened, he must have realized that she had lost her memory and that he had nothing more to worry about. Then, he had continued blithely with his mission, singing his song with a knife on a woman’s body.

  So now she knew. What was she to do next? First, she hurried inside to
find one of her father’s old AA Members Handbooks. He usually kept a couple along with the telephone directory in the bureau drawer in the hall. She turned to the maps at the back and found Whitby. It was on the coast between Scarborough and Redcar, and it didn’t look too big. She ran her finger down the W s in the gazetteer: Whimple, Whippingham, Whiston—there it was, “Whitby, population 13,763.” Bigger than she thought. Still, if the man she was after had such rough hands and smelled of fish, then she would probably find him around the docks or on the boats. She thought she would be able to recognize him, and now the voice would confirm it.

  And she had guidance in her mission—Margaret, Kathleen, Kim and the rest—they wouldn’t let her fail, not now she had come so far. There was a holiness about what she had to do, a reason that she, out of all of them, had been saved. She had been chosen as his nemesis; it was her destiny to find him and face him. She couldn’t picture the actual occasion of their meeting, what would happen. It would be in the open and it would take place at night; that was all she knew. As for the outcome: one of them would die.

  But even a nemesis, she thought wryly, has to plan and deal with practical realities. The AA handbook also gave information about distances from London, York and Scarborough, and listed market days. There followed a selection of hotels, most of which would probably be too expensive for Kirsten. No matter, she could go into Bath and buy a local travel guide that would probably list bed and breakfast accommodation.

  Excited and nervous at the prospect of the hunt, Kirsten settled down to make preparations. She would visit Sarah first and go to Whitby from there. She wouldn’t take much with her, just the handy holdall, jeans, a couple of shirts, and whatever she needed to do the job. It would have to be something small, something she could conceal in her hand, as she knew she might have to act quickly.

  Kirsten shuddered at the thought and began to doubt herself. Then she reminded herself again of all that she had suffered and survived, and the reason for that. She had to be strong; she had to concentrate on practical matters as far as she could and trust to instinct and fate to take care of the rest.

  Two days later, after she had bought a Whitby guide and written to Sarah, she informed her parents that she had decided to go back up north to university. They both expressed concern and displeasure, but that was balanced by relief that she seemed to have come out of her long depression and decided to get on with her life.

  “I won’t say I’m happy you’re going away,” her father said with a sad smile, “but I will say I’m happy that you’ve decided to go. Do you know what I mean?”

  Kirsten nodded. “I suppose I must have been a bit of a pest. I haven’t been very good company, have I?”

  Her father shook his head quickly as if to dismiss her apology. “You know you’re welcome here,” he said, “for as long as you want to stay.”

  All the time, her mother sat stiffly, twisting her hands in her lap. She’ll be glad to see the back of me, Kirsten thought, but she’ll never admit such a horrible thought to herself. Her mother’s life, Kirsten realized, was dominated by the need to keep all unpleasantness at a distance, look good in the eyes of her neighbors, and savagely maintain the borders of her closed and narrow world.

  “I thought I’d go up before term, just to get my bearings again. I think it’d do me good to get out and about a bit. Sarah and I might do some walking in the Dales.”

  “The Yorkshire Dales?” her mother said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Well, dear, I’m just not sure it’s a very suitable environment for a well-brought-up girl such as yourself, that’s all. It’s so very…well, so very bleak and muddy, I hear, and so uncivilized. I’m not sure you even have the proper clothes for such an excursion.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Kirsten said. “Don’t be such a snob.”

  Her mother sniffed. “I was only thinking of your comfort, darling. Of course, I dare say your friend is used to such a…a rough life. But not you.”

  “Mother, Sarah’s family owns half of Herefordshire. She’s not quite the bit of rough you seem to think she is.”

  Her mother looked at her blankly. “I don’t know what you mean, Kirsten. Breeding shows. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Well, I’m going, anyway. And that’s that.”

  “Of course you must go,” her father said, patting her knee. “Your mother’s only concerned about your health, that’s all. Make sure you take plenty of warm clothes and some sensible hiking boots. And stick to the pathways.”

  Kirsten laughed. “You’re almost as bad,” she said. “Anyone would think I was off to the North Pole or somewhere. It’s only a couple of hundred miles north, you know, not a couple of thousand.”

  “All the same,” her father said, “the landscape can be quite treacherous in those parts, and it does rain an awful lot. Just be careful, that’s all I’m asking of you.”

  “Don’t worry, I will.”

  “When are you planning on going?” he asked.

  “Well, I’ll have to wait till I hear from Sarah first and make sure she can put me up and get some time off, but I thought I’d go as soon as I can.”

  “And you’ll be coming back before term starts?”

  “Oh yes. That’s not until the beginning of October. I’ll come back and pick up my books and stuff. I’m hoping I can find a flat up there first, too. Perhaps Sarah and I can share.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” her mother asked.

  “It’ll be better than being on my own, won’t it?”

  Her mother could offer no argument against that.

  “So,” her father said, “you’re off on an adventure. Well, good for you. You must have known there were times when your mother and I…we…we didn’t know what the future was going to bring.”

  “I’m all right, Daddy,” Kirsten said. “Really I am.”

  “Yes, of course. Will you be seeing Dr. Masterson at all while you’re up there? About the…you know?”

  Kirsten nodded. “Probably,” she said. “It won’t do any harm to ask about it, will it?”

  “No, I don’t suppose it will. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you a lift up there. We’ve got a very important project on at the moment and I just can’t take time off. Perhaps you could rent—”

  “That’s all right,” Kirsten said. “I was planning on taking the train. I have to learn to get around on my own.”

  “Well, that’s fine, as long as you feel comfortable with the idea. You’ll be needing some money, won’t you?” he said, and went over to the top right-hand drawer of the sideboard to fetch his checkbook.

  45

  Susan

  Sue got out of the house easily enough without anyone seeing her and went to celebrate her first housebreaking with veal scaloppine, garlic bread and a bottle of Chianti at the expensive restaurant on New Quay Road. After that, she stopped off at her room, then walked about a mile along the coast and threw her holdall, weighted down with heavy pebbles, into the sea. She stood and watched as the tide first threw it back, then sucked it out again and swallowed it. Even if it did turn up somewhere, she thought, it wouldn’t be of any interest to anyone.

  Now it was time to put the final stage of her plan into operation. First, let him sweat for a while.

  And sweat he did. The first time Sue saw him on the day after she had broken into his cottage, he looked harried and preoccupied as he walked in to work. It was raining, and he kept his hands deep in his pockets and his head down, but his glittering eyes swept the street and the windows of the houses all around him. He must have noticed her sitting in the front of Rose’s Café, Sue thought, but his eyes just flicked over her as they did everything and everyone else. He was nervous, on edge, as if he was expecting an ambush at any moment.

  After he had gone by, Sue turned back to the local newspaper. There was no change reported in Keith’s condition and the police seemed to have got nowhere in their search for Jack Grimley’s killer. So far, so good. It would soo
n be over now.

  Near lunchtime on the second day, from the same vantage point, Sue saw him slip into the newsagent’s. Quickly, she left her tea and crossed the street to go in after him. He wouldn’t recognize her. This time, she was dressed differently; also, she wore glasses, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. He glanced around with a start at the bell when she entered, her head lowered, then turned his gaze back to the newsagent.

  “All right today, love?” the woman asked. “You look a bit peaky.”

  “Not enough sleep, that’s all,” he mumbled.

  “Well, you take good care of yourself, you never know what germs is going round these days.”

  “I’m all right,” he said, a little testily. “Just tired, that’s all.” Then he paid for his tobacco and left without even glancing at Sue, who bent over the newspaper and magazine section as before. She picked up the local paper and the Independent. When she took them over to the counter to pay, the woman clucked her tongue and said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with him. Show a bit of polite interest and he damn near bites your head off. Some people can’t even be bothered to be civil these days.”

  “Maybe he’s worried about something,” Sue suggested.

  The woman sighed. “Aye,” she said. “We’ve all got plenty to worry about, haven’t we, what with nuclear war and pollution all over t’place. But I still manage to find a smile and a good morning for my customers.” She went on, almost to herself, as she counted out Sue’s change, “Not like Greg Eastcote, that isn’t. Usually such a pleasant chap.” Then she shrugged. “Ah, well, maybe he is just tired. I could do with a bit of a lie-down myself.”