He would kill her. Now.
He was running, his hands gloved in his pockets and swinging together before him at the end of the metal bar, running past a shop whose windows were boarded up with dislocated doors, past the faintly whistling waste ground and, beneath his window in the side of the house, a dormant restlessly creaking bonfire taller than himself. She must have reached her room by now.
The street was deserted. Bricks lay in the roadway, unmoved by the tugging of the wind. He wavered on the front steps, listening for sounds in the house. The baby wasn’t crying in the cellar, which meant those people must be out; nobody was in the kitchen; even if the old man in the room opposite Dutton’s was home, he was deaf. Dutton floundered into the hall, then halted as if at the end of a chain.
He couldn’t do it here. He stared at the smudged and faded whorls of the wallpaper, the patterns of numbers scribbled above the patch where the telephone had used to be, the way the stairs turned sharply in the gloom just below the landing. The bar hung half out of his coat. He could have killed her beyond the shops, but this was too familiar. He couldn’t imagine a killing here, where everything suffocated even the thought of change—everything, even the creaking of the floorboards.
The floorboards were creaking. She would hear them. All at once he felt he was drowning in sweat. She would come out and see the iron bar, and know what he’d meant to do. She would call the police. He pulled out the bar, tearing a buttonhole, and blundered into her room.
The old woman was at the far end of the room, her back to him. She was turning away from the pram, stooped over as if holding an object against her belly. From her mouth came the sound that had kept him awake so often, a contented lulling sound. For the first time he could hear what she was saying. “Baby,” she was crooning, “baby.” She might have been speaking to a lover or a child.
In a moment she would see him. He limped swiftly forward, his padding footsteps puffing up dust to discolour the dim light more, and swung the iron bar at her head.
He’d forgotten how heavy the bar was. It pulled him down towards her by his weakened arms. He felt her head give, and heard a muffled crackling beneath her hair. Momentarily, as he clung to the bar as it rested in her head against the wall, he was face to face with her, with her eyes and mouth as they worked spasmodically and went slack.
He recoiled, most of all because there was the beginning of a wry smile in her eyes until they faded. Then she fell with a great flat thud, shockingly heavy and loud. Dust rolled out from beneath her, rising about Dutton’s face as he fought a sneeze, settling on the dark patch that was spreading over the old woman’s colourless hair.
Dutton closed his eyes and gripped the bar, propping it against the wall, resting his forehead on the lukewarm metal. His stomach writhed, worse than in the mornings, sending convulsions through his whole body. At last he managed to open his eyes and look down again. She lay with one cheek in the dust, her hair darkening, her arms sprawled on either side of her. They had been holding nothing to her belly. In the dim light she looked like a sleeping drunk, a sack, almost nothing at all. Dutton remembered the crackling of her head and found himself giggling hysterically, uncontrollably.
He had to be quick. Someone might hear him. Stepping over her, he unbuttoned the pram’s apron and pulled it back.
At first he couldn’t make out what the pram contained. He had to crane himself over, holding his body back from obscuring the light. The pram was full of groceries—cabbage, sprouts, potatoes. Dutton shook his head, bewildered, suspecting his eyes of practical joking. He pulled the pram over to the window, remembering only just in time to disguise his hand in the rag he kept as a handkerchief.
The windowpanes looked like the back of a fireplace. Dutton rubbed them with his handkerchief but succeeded only in smudging the grime. He peered into the pram again. It was still almost packed with groceries; only, near the head of the pram, there was a clear space about a foot in diameter. It was empty.
He began to throw out the vegetables. Potatoes trundled thundering over the floorboards, a rolling cabbage scooped up dust in its leaves. The vegetables were fresh, yet she had entered none of the shops, and he was sure he hadn’t seen her filching. He was trying to recall what in fact he had seen when his wrapped hand touched something at the bottom of the pram: something hard, round, several round objects, a corner beneath one, a surface that struck cold through his handkerchief—glass. He lifted the corner and the framed photograph came up out of the darkness, its round transparent cargo rolling. They almost rolled off before he laid the photograph on the corner of the pram, for his grip had slackened as the globes rolled apart to let the old woman stare up at him.
She was decades younger, and there was no doubt she was the woman Maud had shown him. And here were her treasures, delivered to him on her photograph as if on a tray. He grinned wildly and stooped to admire them. He froze in that position, hunched over in disbelief.
There were four of the globes. They were transparent, full of floating specks of light that gradually settled. He stared numbly at them. Close to his eyes threads of sunlight through the window selected sparkling motes of dust, then let them go. Surely he must be wrong. Surely this wasn’t what he’d suffered all night for. But he could see no other explanation. The old woman had been wholly mad. The treasures that had kept her smiling, the treasures she had fought him for, were nothing but four fake snowstorm globes of the kind he’d seen in dozens of toy shops.
He convulsed as if seized by nausea. With his wrapped hand he swept all four globes off the photograph, snarling.
They took a long time to fall. They took long enough for him to notice, and to stare at them. They seemed to be sinking through the air as slowly as dust, turning enormously like worlds, filling the whole of his attention. In each of them a faint image was appearing: in one a landscape, in another a calm and luminous face.
It must be the angle at which you held them to the light. They were falling so slowly he could catch them yet, could catch the face and the landscape he could almost see, the other images that trembled at the very edge of recognition, images like a sweet and piercing song, approaching from inaudibility. They were falling slowly—yet he was only making to move towards them when the globes smashed on the floor, their fragments parting like petals. He heard no sound at all.
He stood shaking in the dimness. He had had enough. He felt his trembling hands wrap the stained bar in his handkerchief. The rag was large enough; it had always made a companionable bulge in his pocket. He sniffed, and wondered if the old woman’s pockets were empty. It was only when he stooped to search that he saw the enormous bulge in her coat, over her belly.
Part of his mind was warning him, but his fingers wrenched eagerly at her buttons. He threw her coat open, in the dust. Then he recoiled, gasping. Beneath the faded flowers of her dress she was heavily pregnant.
She couldn’t be. Who would have touched her? Her coat hadn’t bulged like that in the street, he was sure. But there was no mistaking the swelling of her belly. He pushed himself away from her, his hands against the damp wall. The light was so dim and thick he felt he was struggling in mud. He gazed at the swollen lifeless body, then he turned and ran.
Still there was nobody in the street. He stumbled to the waste ground and thrust the wrapped bar deep in the bonfire. Tomorrow night the blood would be burned away. As he limped through the broken streets, the old woman’s room hung about him. At last, in a doorway two streets distant, he found Tommy.
He collapsed on the doorstep and seized the bottle Tommy offered him. The cloying wine poured down his throat; bile rose to meet it, but he choked them down. As the wind blustered at his chest it seemed to kindle the wine in him. There was no pregnant corpse in the settling dust, no room thick with dim light, no crackling head. He tilted his head back, gulping.
Tommy was trying to wrest the bottle from him. The neck tapped viciously against Dutton’s teeth, but he held it between his lips and thrust his tongue up
to hurry the last drops; then he hurled the bottle into the gutter, where it smashed, echoing between the blank houses. As he threw it, a police car entered the road.
Dutton sat inert while the policemen strolled towards him. Tommy was levering himself away rapidly, crutch thumping. Dutton knew one of the policemen: Constable Wayne. “We can’t pretend we didn’t see that, Billy,” Wayne told him. “Be a good boy and you’ll be out in the morning.”
The wine smudged the world around Dutton for a while. The cell wall was a screen on which he could put pictures to the sounds of the police station: footsteps, shouts, telephones, spoons rattling in mugs. His eyes were coaxing the graffiti from beneath the new paint when, distant but clear, he heard a voice say “What about Billy Dutton?”
“Him knock an old woman’s head in?” Wayne’s voice said. “I don’t reckon he could do that, even sober. Besides, I brought him in around the time of death. He wasn’t capable of handling a bottle, let alone a murder.”
Later a young policeman brought Dutton a mug of tea and some aging cheese sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, then stood frowning with mingled disapproval and embarrassment while Dutton was sick. Yet though Dutton lay rocking with nausea for most of the night, though frequently he stood up and roamed unsteadily about the cell and felt as if his nausea was sinking deep within him like dregs, always he could hear Wayne’s words. The words freed him of guilt. He had risked, and lost, and that was all. When he left the cell he could return to his old life. He would buy a bottle and celebrate with Tommy, Maud, even old Frank.
He could hear an odd sound far out in the night, separate from the musings of the city, the barking dogs, the foghorns on the Mersey. He propped himself on one elbow to listen. Now that it was coming closer he could make it out: a sound like an interrupted metal yawn. It was groaning towards him; it was beside him. He awoke shouting and saw Wayne opening his cell. It must have been the hinges of the door.
“It’s about time you saw someone who can help you,” Wayne said.
Perhaps he was threatening to give Dutton’s address to a social worker or someone like that. Let him, Dutton thought. They couldn’t force their way into his room so long as he didn’t do wrong. He was sure that was true; it must be.
Three doors away from the police station was a pub, a Wine Lodge. They must have let him sleep while he could; the Wine Lodge was already open. Dutton bought a bottle and crossed to the opposite pavement, which was an edge of the derelict area towards which he’d pursued the old woman.
The dull sunlight seemed to seep out of the ruined walls. Dutton trudged over the orange mud, past stagnant puddles in the shape of footprints; water welled up around his shoes, the mud sucked them loudly. As soon as there were walls between him and the police station he unstoppered the bottle and drank. He felt like a flower opening to the sun. Still walking, he hadn’t lowered the bottle when he caught sight of old Frank sitting on the step of a derelict house.
“Here’s Billy,” Frank shouted, and the others appeared in the empty window. At the edge of the waste land a police car was roving; that must be why they had taken refuge.
They came forward as best they could to welcome him. “You won’t be wanting to go home tonight,” Maud said.
“Why not?” In fact there was no reason why he shouldn’t know—he could have told them what he’d overheard Wayne discussing—but he wouldn’t take that risk. They were ready to suspect anyone, these people; you couldn’t trust them.
“Someone did for that old woman,” Frank said. “The one in the room below you. Bashed her head in and took her pram.”
Dutton’s throat closed involuntarily; wine welled up from his lips, around the neck of the bottle. “Took her pram?” he coughed, weeping. “Are you sure?”
“Sure as I was standing outside when they carried her out. The police knew her, you know, her and her pram. They used to look in to make sure she was all right. She wouldn’t have left her pram anywhere, they said. Someone took it.”
“So you won’t be wanting to go home tonight. You can warm my bed if you like,” Maud said toothlessly, lips wrinkling.
“What would anyone want to kill her for?” Betty said, dragging her grey hair over the scarred side of her face. “She hadn’t got anything.”
“She had once. She was rich. She bought something with all that,” Maud said.
“Don’t care. She didn’t have anything worth killing her for. Did she, Billy?”
“No,” Dutton said, and stumbled hurriedly on: “There wasn’t anything in that pram. I know. I looked in it once when she was going in her room. She was poorer than us.”
“Unless she was a witch,” Maud said.
Dutton shook the bottle to quicken the liquor. In a moment it would take hold of him completely, he’d be floating on it, Maud’s words would drift by like flotsam on a warm sea. “What?” he said.
“Unless she was a witch. Then she could have given everything she owned, and her soul as well, to that man they never found, and still have had something for it that nobody could see, or wouldn’t understand if they did see.” She panted, having managed her speech, and drank.
“That woman was a witch right enough,” Tommy said, challenging the splintered floor with his crutch. “I used to go by there at night and hear her singing to herself. There was something not right there.”
“I sing,” Frank said, standing up menacingly, and did so: “Rock of Ages”. “Am I a witch, eh? Am I a witch?”
“They weren’t hymns she was singing, I’ll be bound. If I hadn’t seen her in the street I’d have said she was a darky. Jungle music, it was. Mumbo-jumbo.”
“She was singing to her baby,” Dutton said loosely.
“She didn’t have a baby, Billy,” Maud said. “Only a pram.”
“She was going to have one.”
“You’re the man who should know, are you?” Frank demanded. “She could have fooled me. She was flat as a pancake when they carried her out. Flat as a pancake.”
Dutton stared at Frank for as long as he could, before he had to look away from the deformed strawberry of the man’s nose. He seemed to be telling the truth. Two memories were circling Dutton, trying to perch on his thoughts: a little girl who’d been peering in the old woman’s window one day, suddenly running away and calling back—inappropriately, it had seemed at the time—“Fat cow”; the corpse on the dusty floor, indisputably pregnant even in the dim light. “Flat as a pancake,” Frank repeated.
Dutton was still struggling to understand when Maud said ‘‘What’s that?”
Dutton could hear nothing but the rushing of his blood. “Sounds like a car,” Betty said.
“Too small for a car. Needs oiling, whatever it is.”
What were they talking about? Why were they talking about things he couldn’t understand, that he couldn’t even hear, that disturbed him? “What?” Dutton yelled.
They all stared at him, focusing elaborately, and Tommy thumped his crutch angrily. “It’s gone now,” Maud said at last.
There was a silence until Betty said sleepily “If she was a witch where was her familiar?”
“Her what?” Dutton said as the bottle blurred and dissolved above his eyes. She didn’t know what she was talking about. Nor did he, he shouted at himself. Nor did he.
“Her familiar. A kind of, you know, creature that would do things for her. Bring her food, that kind of thing. A cat, or something. She hadn’t anything like that. She wouldn’t have been able to hide it.”
Nowhere to hide it, Dutton thought. In her pram—but her pram had been empty. The top of his head was rising, floating away; it didn’t matter. Betty’s hand wobbled at the edge of his vision, spilling wine towards him. He grabbed the bottle as her eyes closed. He tried to drink but couldn’t find his mouth. Somehow he managed to stopper the bottle with his finger, and a moment later was asleep.
When he awoke he was alone in the dark.
Among the bricks that were bruising his chest was the bottle, st
ill glued to his finger. He clambered to his feet, deafened by the clattering of bricks, and dug the bottle into his pocket for safety, finger and all. He groped his way out of the house, sniffing, searching vainly for his handkerchief. A wall reeled back from him and he fell, scraping his shoulder. Eventually he reached the doorway.
Night had fallen. Amid the mutter of the city, fireworks were already sputtering; distant chimneys sprang up momentarily against a spray of white fire. Far ahead, between the tipsily shifting walls, the lights of the shops blinked faintly at Dutton. He took a draught to fend off the icy plucking of the wind, then he stuffed the bottle in his pocket and made for the lights.
The mud was lying in wait for him. It swallowed his feet with an approving sound. It poured into his shoes, seeping into the plastic bags. It squeezed out from beneath unsteady paving-stones, where there were any. He snarled at it and stamped, sending it over his trouser cuffs. It stretched glistening faintly before him as far as he could see.
Cars were taking a short cut from the main road, past the shops. Dutton stood and waited for their lights to sweep over the mud, lighting up his way. He emptied the bottle into himself. Headlights swung towards him, blazing abruptly in puddles, pinching up silver edges of ruts from the darkness, touching a small still dark object between the walls to Dutton’s left.
He glared towards that, through the pale fading firework display on his eyeballs. It had been low and squat, he was sure; part of it had been raised, like a hood. Suddenly he recoiled from the restless darkness and began to run wildly. He fell with a flat splash and heaved himself up, his hands gloved in grit and mud. He stumbled towards the swaying lights and glared about whenever headlights flashed between the walls. Around him the walls seemed as unstable as the ground.
Dark Companions Page 24