Chapter Twenty-three
The next time I went down to row, I could see even from the harbour wall that there was something in the boat. It was in the middle of the central thwart, just where I sat. I kept looking, trying to work out what it was. I hadn’t left anything there, I never did. Whatever it was, it was large, probably a foot across, and a greyish-white colour. It wasn’t until I was on the pontoon, pulling in the mooring line to bring the boat closer, that I realised I was looking at a carcass.
I got into the dinghy for a closer look. It was the remains of what had been a substantial bird, a Canada goose or perhaps one of last year’s cygnets. There was no head or even much of a neck, just a ribcage to which white, grey and light brown feathers adhered in clumps. The bones of it were as symmetrical as the ribs of a Viking ship. Obviously it had been dead some time: there was hardly any flesh left on the frame or within it, and what little there was had been dried by the sun and wind and rain until it was like biltong, a dark, desiccated substance in which the remaining feathers were anchored. The plumage itself was greasy-looking; there was a smear of something like tar across the largest patch of it and the rest of the feathers were ragged and grimy from post-mortem exposure to the elements. It stank.
How had it got into the boat? Clearly it hadn’t flown here and died, just dropped out of the sky; something or someone had brought it here. I supposed it was possible that another animal had done it; a scavenging seagull might just have lifted it, then dropped it again, realising that it had taken on more than it could carry, but it seemed unlikely. It seemed unlikely, too, that if it had been dropped from a height even of five or so feet, it would have landed so neatly; it would have bounced into the bottom of the boat, surely. Might a fox have brought it? Not to a boat on water.
It would have to be moved before I could take the boat out and I didn’t want to touch it. In the end I picked up one of the oars and slid its blade underneath the thing like a baker’s paddle. Moving carefully in case I dropped it, I manoeuvred until the blade was over the water and then I turned it sharply and tipped the repulsive thing into the sea. For a second or two, its lack of weight kept it on the surface and I watched as it floated, rocking slightly, the feathers darkening as they grew wet. Slowly it sat lower and lower in the water and then, reaching critical mass, it sank. I kept my eyes on it as it went, a few last bubbles rising through the green water to burst on the surface. Finally it was swallowed from view.
Who had done it? Richard was my first, irrational thought but the real answer was easy enough when I thought about it: Tom. It had to be him: the vast majority of Yarmouth had no idea who I was and even less interest, and Mary had said that he was usually responsible for anything untoward that went on. What had she called him? A right little psycho. This was a petty act of revenge because I’d challenged him at the café. Pathetic.
It had been threatening rain all morning and while I’d been out in the dinghy it had started, letting down a fine sort of drizzle which grew gradually heavier until I was forced to abandon ship and come in. Now I sat at my desk and watched it falling steadily across the town green and the harbour. There were occasional squalls of wind which carried it sideways and made it hop in the large puddles already accruing in the gutters along River Road.
There had been some good news waiting for me when I’d turned my computer on. Sylvie, the editor for whom I had worked most often over the past three or four years, had emailed to say that she was currently in an auction for the rights to the first two novels in a new literary crime series; it wasn’t settled and she might not get them but if she did, she’d been thinking of me to translate; would I be interested? The books – the first had been written, the second outlined – were set in Bristol, she said, which had made her think of me straight away.
I was touched that she’d remembered where I’d grown up. Though we often emailed and spoke on the phone when I was working on something for her, I’d only ever met her once in person, at her office in Paris. As she’d come to the door to meet me, my first impression had been glamour. She was in her late forties, I estimated, and was wearing a knee-length suede skirt the colour of crème caramel and a white shirt with a dramatic gold-and-leather necklace. Her thick dark hair, untouched by silver, was cut in a short bob that swung as she moved.
My second impression had been how much she resembled my mother, both in looks and style. My mother had even had the same haircut when I’d last seen her, the time I’d made a trip to Lyon, wanting to tell her in person that I was starting a career in translating. A part of me, I realised afterwards, had been hoping against all the odds that my news would make her proud of me. Instead she had looked surprised. ‘Oh,’ she’d said. ‘But are you sure your French is good enough?’
While I had been in the dinghy earlier, the lifeboat had gone out. I’d heard the flare go up and only a couple of minutes later the roar of the engine as the boat left the harbour and sped away down the Solent. Now it was on its way in again, its orange decks moving slowly back to its mooring behind the masts of the yachts tied up at the quay. Where had Peter – Pete – been the morning it went out looking for Alice? I wondered. It must have been him who called the emergency services. Had he been there on the harbour when the flare went up?
There was a ping as the computer announced a new message. I clicked into my inbox and saw Richard’s name there, seeming almost to pulsate with energy. Ignore it, I thought. Don’t read it – just get rid of it. I clicked to highlight it and moved the curser up to the delete button at the top of the screen but then I hesitated. I stood up and went out of the room for a few moments. If you don’t read it, then he can’t get to you, I told myself; don’t let him in. And then the other voice. But what if there’s something new? What if he’s writing to say that he’s found you, that he’s coming? Disgusted with myself even as I was doing it, I went back to the study and opened the mail.
I’m thinking about you today, Katie. I’m thinking about our first night. You know there isn’t a room in my flat where I don’t have memories of your body against some item of the furniture. The dining table, the sheepskin rug, the coffee table, the counter in the kitchen – do you remember that? You couldn’t get enough of me.
I remember your body exactly, every detail of it – the scar on your knee where you fell off the climbing-frame at school, the mark of your rubella injection, that mole on your left breast. I remember what your hair looks like against your bare back. I remember how you smell, and how you taste – like rain, I always thought. I’m watching the rain today and thinking about that.
The images he conjured came spilling one after another, just as he planned, no doubt. I was filled with shame and revulsion, remembering how I had been so willing, how I had opened myself to him body and soul, his face that night as it contorted with agonised pleasure, his hands touching my face, my breasts. Quickly I deleted the mail, turned off the computer and unplugged it, as if that would somehow stop the pictures.
I needed to go out now, to be with people for a while and be normal. I would go to one of the cafés. Before I put my coat on, though, I quickly texted Helen: Is it raining in London?
Cats & dogs, came the response, and then, in another text about ten seconds later: Why?
Water was rushing along the gutters either side of the passageway and bubbling down the Victorian drains. I had an umbrella and my full-length coat but as I ran to Gossips, the rain was so hard that it was bouncing up off the ground and soaking the bottom of my jeans.
I ordered coffee and sat at one of the tables furthest from the counter. The room was busy – busier than I had ever seen Mary’s – and there was Motown on the stereo, the chunter of the coffee-maker and a babble of conversation at the tables around me. I waited for the relief to come, for the shadow of Richard to be banished by the normality of it, people sitting together to eat a late lunch on a wet afternoon, but today it wasn’t working. Instead his poison seemed to be leaching out to discolour it, to make it seem flimsy and
impermanent, no protection at all.
I fought down a fresh wave of panic at losing even that small weapon against him. Yet again he’d known just how to get under my skin, to make me feel that I had traduced myself, let him know things about me that no one should know and which would be used against me. I thought of Tom and his street-tough attitude, his attempt at intimidation with the swan carcass in the boat; in comparison to Richard, he was laughable – almost sweet. Richard wasn’t even here and yet he had fifty times the power to frighten me. I nearly laughed aloud now when I thought of Mary’s description of Tom with his graffiti and petty theft as a psycho; what would she say if I told her even a fraction of what had happened with Richard? Tom was just a thug, like those bolshy Canada geese on the river at Shalfleet – a teenager at war with the world. Richard was something else altogether.
Psycho – psychopath. I turned the word over in my mind, and heard a click. It wasn’t just a word, I knew that, a generic term bandied about by the tabloids when they wanted to whip up a public storm about some ‘monster’ or other. It was a real thing – a proper mental disorder. I’d read about it once, a big reportage piece in a magazine. A lack of any feeling for other people was what I remembered, and a complete lack of conscience about their behaviour. Psychopaths didn’t seem to feel emotion in the same way as most people – fear or love or shame. And lies – there had been a lot about lies, about how psychopaths would say anything, lying without giving it a second thought, almost without seeming to know they were doing it. They were charming, too; in the article, I remembered now, the journalist had written about how she’d felt herself begin to be seduced by one of the psychopaths she’d interviewed, even though she’d been talking to him in prison. He was a handsome man with a soft voice and he’d told her she was beautiful at a time in her life when she’d been vulnerable, she’d confessed, the piece taking an unexpectedly personal turn.
The wheel in my brain was turning and with each revolution there was a new click, a falling into place. The violence against Sarah and me and who knows how many other women – the article had described how psychopaths shrugged off the injuries they’d inflicted on others; in some cases, they’d hardly even seemed to remember them. And womanising, promiscuity – now the floor seemed to tilt under my seat, and the noise in the room receded, like a tide going out. It made sense – it all made sense.
I sat up late on the internet. It was like old times at the flat in Earls Court, except then I had been happy for my neighbours across the street to see me in the light from the desk lamp; now the thought of my face illuminated in the window, lit up to be seen by anyone passing on River Road, made me feel so vulnerable that I pulled the curtains as soon as the light began to fade, twilight coming early because of the rain.
The more sites I read, the more certain I was. On academic and psychiatry pages I read about the psychopath’s ‘grandiose sense of self’ and ‘need for stimulation’ and thought of his risk-taking and high-handedness in business, the repeated adultery, even the driving, which had been so terrifying. Promiscuity and infidelity came up again and again.
Later on I found myself in chat-rooms where people who’d been involved with psychopaths shared their stories, seeking comfort. There were several cases so similar to mine that it was like seeing my own situation described. Many seemed to start when their victims had been fragile, when they were bereaved or divorced or recovering from illness. A lot featured women who had been lonely for a long time, romantics who wore their hearts on their sleeves even now. In had swept a saviour, a new lover who caught them up in a whirlwind and made them forget all their problems. The attraction was always so strong, the protestations of love so fierce and swift. Then, when the fish was irrevocably hooked, it was payback time. The stories weren’t just from women: there were accounts from men who’d met women who entranced them, almost put them under a spell, and then slept with their friends and spent their money before walking out of their lives without leaving so much as a note. Nor was it only the women who confessed to having suffered violence.
In every case I could see the warning signs – the charm, the precipitate declarations, the focus on sex and money, the endless lies. I got angry with myself: how, if I could see it in all of these cases, had I been so blind to it in my own? Then I came across a post from a woman who had been deeply wounded. ‘I thought psychopaths were like Hannibal Lecter,’ she’d written. ‘It didn’t occur to me that they walked the streets among us, just like ordinary people.’
Chapter Twenty-four
I’d swapped numbers with Pete so that we could be in touch about going out on the boat again. On the Friday of that week, I’d switched my phone on as I was walking back from my shift at the café and picked up a rather abrupt voicemail telling me that the forecast wasn’t good and he had some work which he had to do instead. He might go out the following weekend if I was still interested; he’d call nearer the time.
I knew I’d been looking forward to sailing again but, even so, the extent of my disappointment surprised me. Clearly this was how it started, I thought; they got you hooked with rowing boats and dinghies and then, before you knew it, you were on to the hard stuff. It wasn’t only the sailing that I regretted, though; I’d wanted the distraction, someone to do something with for a change.
I felt that need even more strongly now. I was spending hours on the internet, drawn to the chat-rooms even though all they did was make me more afraid. I read stories about men falsely accused by jealous psychopathic women and thrown in jail. I read about men and women who’d had to abandon their whole lives – homes, jobs, families, friends, even their names – to try to get free. There was one case in particular to which I came back again and again. It was the story of a woman who’d met a man in a bar in Toronto. A lawyer in her late thirties, financially successful but a workaholic, she had almost given up on the idea of a relationship and falling in love. For a year she had appeared blissfully happy but then her friends started to worry about her; she lost weight and always seemed exhausted. She cancelled arrangements and when she did show up, it was never on her own; always the boyfriend was there, intense and negative. When the first bruises had appeared she’d lied about them but after she’d turned up bleeding and in a nightie on her best friend’s doorstep in the early hours of the morning in a driving blizzard, she’d finally agreed that she needed to leave him, accept help. But he hadn’t let her leave. For nine months he pursued her – stalked her – sending abusive letters and emails, breaking into her house, turning up in restaurants where she’d made reservations though she’d gone miles out of her way to avoid the places he might be. In the end she’d changed her name and fled to America, leaving her whole life behind her. And it still hadn’t been enough. He’d found her, tracked her down to a small apartment in Portland, Oregon, where he’d broken in and strangled her. The story was posted by her sister.
It had occurred to me that perhaps Pete regretted saying I should come sailing again, and that putting me off was a way of gently rescinding the invitation, but, true to his word, he did call the following Friday. The forecast was better, he said, overcast and not especially warm but with less chance of rain. He was calling from a landline, not the mobile whose number I’d stored; it was the first time I’d seen an Island code come up on my phone.
This time we left the Newtown River and turned to the west. We sailed past the woods that crowded down to the shore along that part of the coast, and then on towards Yarmouth. We passed the shingle bank where I had been standing when I’d watched the lifeboat tow Alice’s scow back in, and I turned my thoughts away. I didn’t want to think about her here, on Beatrice; I didn’t like the idea of being in her place.
Pete saw her everywhere, I was sure. He was quieter today, the peace between us somehow different, more melancholy. As we went out by Fort Victoria on the point, I heard a bell tolling, its low funereal sound reaching towards us over the water. It sent a shiver over me.
‘OK?’ he asked.
/> ‘Fine – just a bit chilly. What’s that bell?’
‘It’s in the buoy – Sconce, that one’s called.’ He pointed to a black metal structure rocking slowly on the waves about thirty feet away. ‘If it’s foggy here, you can’t see the channel markers.’
The tolling went on and to me it sounded like a lament for all those who had been lost here – not only Alice but hundreds and hundreds of people, wrecked and drowned, stretching back through centuries. I tried to ignore it but on it went, lugubrious, until it was no longer a lament but warning, premonitory.
With no sun, the water was grey-green. It shifted constantly, the tidal race visible where the channel narrowed between the promontory at Hurst on the mainland and Sconce Point on the Island, the occasional white horse breaking the surface. There was a good breeze for sailing – about a force four, Pete said – and the sails were tight with it. He let me have the helm and moved around on the deck up near the bow putting up a deep maroon sail as well as the main one, pulling the rope hard down to run it up. ‘The spinnaker,’ he told me, coming back into the cockpit.
He was smoking today, which I hadn’t seen him do before. His car didn’t smell of cigarettes, either; I would have noticed. He cupped his hand around the flame while he lit one and then held it out to me. ‘You do, don’t you?’
‘Occasionally,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘I thought we’d go down to Purbeck to see Old Harry.’
‘Who’s Old Harry?’
He smiled. ‘It’s a chalk stack by the cliffs there, part of the same seam as the back of the Island.’ He lapsed back into silence, smoking his cigarette and tossing the butt over the side. I watched him surreptitiously. The Musto jacket had been replaced today by a heavy oiled-wool navy jumper, the collar of a checked shirt just visible underneath. The jeans were the paint-splashed ones but they’d been through the wash: the mud on the knees was gone. He looked more tired than he had last time, older. The circles under his eyes were deep and grey. It was my imagination, of course, but his hair seemed greyer, too, in the short bits above his ears. I offered him the helm but he shook his head.
The Bed I Made Page 22