The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  Elizabeth Drury would become an angel. The name itself was the broken-hearted soul of pity. A tragic acquaintance of Donne: the fifteen-year-old daughter of a patron, she had died prematurely of some unknown disease. Now Crowan Frayne would give the name a new significance: extol it beyond even Donne’s own achievement in ‘The Anniversairie’.

  He had started searching for an Elizabeth Drury even before he had visited Lucy Harrington. The strongest arguments are fully constructed and sounded before they are articulated. There were ten ‘Drurys’ in the telephone book, none with the initial ‘E’. He toyed with the idea of calling each and asking for Elizabeth on the off chance that there might be a wife or a daughter. That struck him as clumsy: they had to be a more efficient way. He then went to his computer and downloaded a UK people-finder program available on the Internet. He entered ‘Elizabeth Drury’ and New Bolden as the search parameters. His search provided no results. If there was an Elizabeth Drury in the area, she was almost certainly ex-directory. He would need to be more resourceful.

  The New Bolden town library is an impressive building on three storeys. It was built in the mid-eighties after a series of cash donations from some of the computer and logistics companies that had relocated to the town from London. In the front lobby is a grey plaque that was unveiled by a minor member of the royal family when the library first opened. The library is modern and extremely well stocked. Crowan Frayne is a regular visitor. He does not hold a library card, preferring to steal the books that excite his curiosity. He tends to work in the Reference Room: a quiet annexe on the second floor away from the rustling carrier bags of pensioners, the raking coughs of the unemployed and the grim squadron of wailing babies that often make Frayne want to rip his own stomach out with the carpet knife he always carries with him.

  He uses the library’s large resource of literary criticisms and certain history books of the Renaissance. It was here on an opaque, foggy morning that he discovered Reconstructing Donne by Dr Heather Stussman of the University of Wisconsin. There was a striking picture of Stussman on the inside back cover. Intrigued, he dug out back copies of the TLS and the Literary Review and finally unearthed a critical review of the book. It was spiteful and, in Frayne’s view, idiotic. The author, Professor Arthur Spink of Exeter University, subsequently received a human stool in the post: carefully wrapped in tinfoil inside a Tupperware container tied with a silk bow. The accompanying note simply said ‘Cunt’. However, Spink’s review had provided him with one piece of useful information: Stussman was a visiting Fellow at Southwell College, Cambridge for the current academic year. Frayne had been shocked by the discovery. Cambridge was only twenty miles away.

  It was while Frayne was searching for other publications by Heather Stussman that he chanced upon Dr Elizabeth Drury. The library had recently installed a state-of-the-art computer system that enabled the user to search for books across a network that linked all the libraries in the area– including the University Library in Cambridge, one of the few copyright libraries in Britain. Using this system, Frayne had learned the title of Stussman’s doctoral thesis and obtained copies of two academic articles she had written when she’d still been in America.

  After a productive session at the computer, he was struck by an idea. He returned to the first page of the ‘bookfinder’ programme and clicked twice on the ‘Master Name’ box. The likeness of a typewriter keyboard appeared on the screen. Using his mouse to guide the screen arrow he clicked in the name ‘Elizabeth Drury’ and tapped the return key. The screen blanked for a second before a white dialogue box containing the following text appeared:

  Search results: One match

  Author: Drury, Elizabeth J.

  Title: The Weight of Expectation: Obesity and Self-Image

  Class Mark: 678.094’ 081

  Year: 1992

  Material Type: Non-Fiction

  Language of Text: English

  Copies: 1

  Frayne fingered the petals in his jacket pocket and hurriedly noted down the class mark. The simplicity of the process had dazzled him. He walked to the health-care section of the library and quickly located The Weight of Expectation: Obesity and Self Image. It was a thick, well-thumbed hardback with a picture on the front cover of a young woman wearing a leotard and holding a mirror. Frayne wondered if there were chocolate fingerprints on the inside pages. The photo and accompanying paragraph of author’s details were helpful: ‘Dr Elizabeth Drury was educated at University College, Oxford and Guys Medical School. She is a leading international dietician and runs the Drury Clinic, a private medical practice in London. She has published a number of articles on the psychological aspects of obesity. The Weight of Expectation is her first book.’ However, it was the last piece of information that excited Frayne the most. ‘Dr Drury has lived in Cambridgeshire for ten years.’ Frayne never understood why authors included such pointless personal detail: perhaps Dr Drury felt that announcing she lived in Cambridgeshire somehow enhanced her intellectual credibility. In any case, he now had all the information he needed to find her: a drop of blood had plopped into the water. He noticed that the book also contained an extensive bibliography: that might prove useful.

  Directory Inquiries gave him the phone number of the Drury Clinic. He called immediately and asked the receptionist for the clinic’s mailing address.

  ‘17 Mayfair Crescent, SW1.’ She had an Australian accent. He liked that. He didn’t know why.

  ‘Very helpful – thank you. Is Dr Drury’s husband available?’ asked Frayne.

  ‘Husband? There must be some mistake. Dr Drury isn’t married.’

  ‘I do apologize. I’m confusing doctors with dentists,’ said Frayne flatly.

  ‘No problem. You have a nice day now.’ But Frayne had already gone.

  The following day he took the train from New Bolden to London and then the Underground to Leicester Square. After a brisk ten minutes’ walk he was in Mayfair Crescent. It was a busy road, cluttered with traffic and expensively suited professionals. There were double yellow lines on both sides of the street. He guessed that Drury came in by train. If she lived in Cambridgeshire that meant she probably came into Liverpool Street and then across town on the Central Line. She was wealthy, though, Frayne mused. Maybe she took a cab. That would be problematic. The entrance to the Drury Clinic was impressive. White Doric columns topped with an ornately carved lintel: smoked-glass doors with golden handles. They might have self-image problems but Drury’s clients were clearly rich.

  The clinic closed at six p.m. A dozen or so staff, secretaries mostly, filed out shortly after. Frayne didn’t see Drury until six-thirty. She left the building with another woman and they parted company with a reassuring hug: ‘Client,’ Frayne thought to himself. Drury walked to the edge of the road and looked intently in both directions for a cab. It was a cold night in London and the wind whipped up bitterly from the Thames: piercing and hard.

  Drury lost patience and started to walk. Frayne followed at a distance. Drury was tall, blonde and elegant. She wore a dark red full-length coat that was easy to spot despite the bustle of early Christmas shoppers. She walked up Haymarket to Piccadilly and descended into the Underground station at Piccadilly Circus. Frayne got closer: the crowd was thick now and he felt anonymous. He caught a glimpse of himself on a security monitor at the top of an escalator: coat collar up, baseball hat tightly pulled down. He managed to suppress a smile. Drury took the northbound Piccadilly line to Holborn, as he suspected she would, and switched to the Central Line. Frayne smiled to himself: Liverpool Street.

  The concourse at Liverpool Street was a sweaty, bumping chaos. Dozens of tired eyes gazed up at the departure-announcements board: many squinting to read its impossibly small text. Drury paused below the board next to a group of foreign students who were sitting on rucksacks and eating baguettes. She saw her train on the board and quickly turned towards Platform 5. Frayne saw that it was a Cambridge train. Drury hurried ahead of him and stepped carefully into a f
irst class carriage: she had broken heels on the footplate several times in the past. Frayne walked past the carriage without looking inside and boarded the packed adjacent standard class section. It smelled of beefburgers and the warm fug of commuters. Through dirty glass panes he could see into first class.

  The train shuddered out of London, moving slowly through graffiti-sprayed cuttings and the rapist’s paradise of Hackney Marshes. Soon the city receded and the black sky seemed to drop to the ground like a falling curtain. The train emptied gradually. The extra comfort this afforded was outweighed in Frayne’s mind by his own increased visibility. Harlow came and went and soon the flat blacklands of Cambridgeshire yawned enormously in both directions. They had to be close now. Drury had put down her newspaper and seemed to be assessing her profile in the dark window. She tugged gently at the skin that hung from the angle of her jaw. After an hour the train began to drop off the last handfuls of commuters at each of the small village stations that nestled against the last stretch of line before Cambridge. As the train groaned into Afton, Drury stood up and walked to the door.

  She stepped cautiously off the train and clicked briskly in her high heels along the platform. There were two or three other people between her and Crowan Frayne. She walked into the car park and used her remote to beep off the security system of her grey Audi TT.

  Frayne held back and pretended to jangle his own car keys at the door of a nearby Renault Clio. The Audi roared to life and growled expensively along the line of cars. Crowan Frayne made certain not to look until it had gone completely past him. Then he wrote down Elizabeth Drury’s licence plate number on his hand and walked back into the station. He took a local train into Cambridge and then changed for New Bolden.

  Once home he wrote down the following details: ‘Wednesday. Office 6.30. 7.17 from Liverpool Street, first class carriage. Afton station 8.22. Grey Audi. EDR92.’

  The next morning he called the Drury Clinic and spoke to the same Australian receptionist. He used a name that he knew Drury would recognize.

  ‘Good morning. My name is Dr Thomas Stiglitz. I am a professional acquaintance of Dr Drury’s.’

  ‘I’m afraid she is with a patient at the moment.’

  ‘Can I make an appointment to see her? I am in London for two days next week and would like to visit her at the clinic. I’m calling from the United States.’

  ‘I’ll check her diary. Which day did you have in mind?’

  ‘December the eleventh.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Six o’clock.’

  ‘That should be OK. She has a five-thirty but I could bump that forward.’

  ‘If you could. As soon as I’ve seen Elizabeth, I’m heading back to LA.’

  ‘Can I check the spelling of your name, sir?’

  ‘Stiglitz.’ Frayne checked the bibliography of The Weight of Expectations, which he had opened in front of him, ‘S-t-i-g-l-i-t-z. I am from the University of Los Angeles at Berkeley.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. That’s all booked. Have a good day now.’

  Elizabeth Drury was surprised and delighted when she saw the new name in her diary.

  ‘Stiggy! I haven’t spoken to him in five years.’

  ‘He sounded like a real nice guy,’ said Sally the receptionist from behind a steaming café latte in a cardboard cup.

  ‘He is. Kind of brilliant, too.’

  Elizabeth Drury went back into her consulting rooms with a smile on her face and marvelled at how the world seemed to get smaller every day. Miles away, in a darkened living room, Crowan Frayne closed the copy of The Weight of Expectations that he had stolen from the New Bolden library and threw it in the bin.

  A week had passed since Crowan Frayne had arranged the meeting. During that time he had been active: planning, researching. He had cleaned Lucy Harrington’s eye thoroughly and spent considerable time enjoying its dead blueness. He had expended much time the previous evening delicately cutting away residual muscle and raggedness from the surface of the eyeball. He wanted it to be smooth as glass.

  He had also washed and checked his collection of medical instruments. When the exceptional brilliance of his conceit had first sparked across his brain he had quickly taken stock of the equipment available to him. Kitchen knives and carpet cutters seemed to him cumbersome and witless tools for such an important exercise. He had rooted through his grandfather’s garage in search of more delicate knives and found instead two steel-headed hammers. He realized these would be useful. One was small enough to be concealed in the sleeve of his jacket.

  The question of cutting instruments had perturbed him. He needed small, light and razor-sharp knives, along with other specific equipment like forceps. There were no stores in New Bolden that sold medical equipment. He wondered if Cambridge with its University medical faculty and Addenbrokes Hospital might be a more likely hunting ground. He quickly realized that there were no medical equipment suppliers in the region that sold over the counter. Frayne was frustrated. What were his alternatives? Stealing equipment from the hospital or the university was a possibility that he quickly discounted. That would be a highly risky undertaking: both locations were always crowded with people and, Frayne mused, probably protected with video-camera surveillance. It was too big a chance to be taken.

  Then Frayne had an idea. He remembered that the essence of his work was beyond science and history, filling the gaps between knowledge and belief. Like his conceit, he would need to transcend time. Or fold it. He had turned on his computer and linked up to the Internet. After typing in the search terms ‘antique medical instruments’, half a dozen options had appeared on his screen. One of them seemed especially promising. An antiques shop in Hampstead, London called Lieberman’s. Its home page promised ‘antique furniture, paintings, works of art, and glass, antique surgical equipment.’ Better still, there was a section of the website devoted entirely to Lieberman’s collection of medical and scientific items. There were photographs of three boxes of surgical knives dating from the nineteeth century and, to Frayne’s great delight, an ophthalmic surgery kit from 1840. He had driven to London that same afternoon and after trying unsuccessfully for an hour to park in Hampstead had eventually left his van in the car park of Jack Straw’s Castle and had walked down Hampstead High Street to Lieberman’s.

  The shop was tucked away in a side alley behind the entrance to Hampstead Tube station. A woman worked alone inside. She was middle-aged, quietly elegant with greying blonde hair. Frayne noticed her silk scarf: it was beautifully styled, with azure patterns that sharpened her porcelain-grey eyes. He started when he heard her sudden phlegmy smoker’s cough. The entanglement of beauty and ugliness jarred in him. Using information he had gleaned from the website, Frayne managed to sound like something of an expert. He said he was looking for an antique medical kit as a birthday present for his father: a prominent London eye surgeon. The woman had made the connection herself and told Frayne that she had the very thing. She disappeared to a darker and, judging by the increased frequency of her coughing, dustier section of the shop, returning with the small ophthalmic surgery kit Frayne had seen on the website.

  It had been made in 1840 by John Weiss (later of Weiss and Son) of The Strand, London. The small black leather box bore Weiss’s name and crest. The inside was lined with red silk and contained twelve ivory-handled scalpels, a selection of grisly surgical scissors, four small clamps for holding back the eyelids, some long needles with hooked ends, a pair of forceps and two L-shaped scraping implements. There was also a set of spindly metal surgeon’s magnifying glasses that clamped around the patient’s head and enabled the surgeon to look deep into the eye. The kit was in immaculate condition, a unique set. Frayne had picked up one of the scalpels. It felt almost weightless and beautifully balanced in his delicate grip. The cutting edge had lost some of its sharpness but Frayne knew that, with care, it could be restored. ‘Makes you shudder, doesn’t it?’ said the woman, smiling. ‘What those poor people must have gone though.’
Frayne had politely agreed with her and paid the eight hundred pounds asking price in cash.

  Tonight he would visit Dr Elizabeth Drury in her house near Afton. He had no intention of keeping Dr Thomas Stiglitz’s appointment at The Drury Clinic. However, when Dr Stiglitz failed to turn up he reckoned that Drury would rush to catch the 7.17 from Liverpool Street. He had effectively cleared her appointments for that evening: she had no other reason to delay in London and he could predict her timetable accurately. He would be in the car park at Afton station waiting for her. Before then he would need to focus carefully on poetic expression.

  Donne had commemorated Drury’s premature death in ‘The Anniversairies’. However, in ‘A Feaver’ the poet had attempted to wrestle with similar concepts, particularly the exaltation of the dead woman to the status of a celestial entity and the reduction of the world to the status of a carcass. ‘A Feaver’ was more concise but related to Elizabeth Drury only in its roughly equivalent thematic content. Frayne was confident that Dr Stussman would make the connection. If she didn’t, he would enjoy explaining it to her personally.

  24

  When Paul Heyer returned home at three o’clock that afternoon, Julia Underwood was already waiting for him. She had poured herself a gin and tonic and was sitting on the edge of the sofa, her suitcase resting pathetically and accusingly in front of her. She jumped when she heard his key turn in the door and she ran out to embrace him.

  ‘Paul! I was worried. I thought you’d be here.’ She was shaking.

  ‘So did I.’ He took a step back from her embrace.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, her eyes seeking a clue in the lines of his face.

  He wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘I have been in a police interrogation room, being grilled by your husband.’

  ‘By John? Why?’ Julia was shocked: she felt as though a terrible weight had dropped in her stomach.