The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘He cut their eyes out. One from each of them.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Now, why do you think someone would do a thing like that? Do you think he collects them? Do you think he puts them in a jar as though they were pickled eggs?’

  ‘For God’s sake, John.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Underwood continued, ‘If he did, he’d have taken both eyes: left and right. So ask yourself, why would you need two left eyes, Julia?

  ‘Come on, Jules.’ Underwood was crying too. ‘Welcome to my head. I want you to understand.’ He felt a sudden urge to ram a knife into his chest and tear his tormented lungs out.

  ‘I’m trying to.’

  ‘So.’ He was coughing again. ‘One more time. What would happen, if I’d – say – removed old Pauly-boy’s eye, for example. Our killer likes poetry. Think aesthetics.’

  She looked up in utter despair. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He’d need another one, wouldn’t he?’ Underwood was breaking up; like a satellite re-entering the atmosphere, he was burning inside and out, falling apart. ‘I wasn’t there for you and you replaced me. Same difference, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘I didn’t replace you. I fell in love with someone else. It happens.’

  ‘So does shit.’

  ‘Now tell me where Paul is.’ She was more confident now. Underwood was crumbling before her eyes but as the wave of her anger receded it fizzed on tiny fragments of pity.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘If you could live life again, compress everything into a split second where you felt every emotion, thought every thought, what would you remember most vividly?’

  ‘John, I …’

  ‘Tell me.’ Beads of sweat gleamed on his forehead: some fell and spread miserably on the floor. ‘What would you remember?’ He tried to take her hand but she moved quickly away.

  ‘Loneliness,’ she said simply.

  The eye of time focused on him suddenly. He felt pierced by its tragic gaze. ‘Me too,’ said Underwood, struggling for breath. ‘For in a common bath of teares it bled. I understand that now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Paul’s on the beach path. I hurt him.’

  ‘I’ll get him. Please go now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Underwood coughed hard as he stood up and a new flame burned in his chest. Harder, hotter than before. Blood spat from his mouth. He gripped at his heart, trying to tear out the agony. The chair fell backwards as he staggered against the wall while the room began to spin in nauseating circles. The ground seemed to fall away from under him.

  John Underwood collapsed in on himself and fell awkwardly to the floor.

  It was 2.04 a.m. Exhausted and shaking, Julia had called the Norfolk police and an ambulance. Then, afraid of what she might find, she stepped out into the freezing night to look for Paul Heyer.

  50

  13 December

  Heather Stussman lay awake, waiting for the dawn. She was a poor sleeper at the best of times but bad dreams had torn her night horribly apart. Knowing that there was a policeman outside the entrance to her rooms hadn’t helped. In fact, the rustling of his newspaper and the occasional squawk of his police radio had woken her several times.

  She was concerned for her career at least as much as for her physical safety. It had been a long, arduous climb up the academic greasy pole. Getting funding for her doctoral thesis had been tough, researching it had been tougher. Dredging up the discipline to haul through volumes of stodgy literary criticism and ancient monographs had been akin to a labour of Hercules. Her book had been similarly painstaking but at least it had enabled her to cast off the shackles of deference and forelock-tugging that had compromised her PhD dissertation.

  Reconstructing Donne had given Stussman a certain notoriety but it had closed as many doors as it had opened. She had almost become the academic equivalent of soiled goods. A successful fellowship at Southwell was vital to restoring her credibility. This was particularly vulnerable in the USA where the intellectual establishment tended to have long memories and fragile egos. She had avoided writing book reviews in the British newspapers, despite receiving a number of lucrative offers, and concentrated instead on researching her next piece for the academic journals. But now her association with the New Bolden murders was becoming quite widely known across the university: in Cambridge bad news spread like an airborne virus. They would be queuing up to demolish her career. She would not get re-elected at Southwell and would have to go back to Wisconsin worse off than when she had left. Then Stussman thought of Elizabeth Drury and Lucy Harrington and felt horribly guilty, sickened by her own selfishness.

  She walked through into her kitchenette and made a cup of coffee. She was nursing a mild headache induced by cognac and insomnia and the hissing of the kettle grated unpleasantly. The caffeine smacked her satisfyingly between the eyes and she returned to her lounge in slightly better spirits.

  It was still dark outside. Britain seemed to run out of sunlight completely by the end of November. Clouds rolled low across Cambridge from the east, threatening to engulf the spires of King’s College Chapel. The reflected clouds would blacken the Cam and turn it the colour of burned treacle. There had been a storm in the small hours and from her window Stussman could see that leaves and litter had been blown onto the lawn at the centre of the first quad. The trees in the college garden would be skeletal. Something was niggling at her. Was it something she had forgotten?

  She turned on a desk lamp and slumped into her armchair.

  She thought briefly of Underwood. He was an interesting character: polite and perceptive. She had registered his interest in her, too, had felt his eyes edging over her when he’d thought she wasn’t looking. Dexter had grown on her slightly. The sergeant’s brusque manner had annoyed her at first but Dexter had asked pertinent questions and made intelligent connections about the poetry. That was refreshing. Perhaps the friction had come from similarities between them, Stussman mused. After all, they were both outsiders in worlds that men dominated. Stussman wondered which one of them had been patronized and pissed on the most in their respective careers: it was a tough call.

  The wind rattled her window and whined outside in the stairway. Four, maybe five months until spring: it was a depressing thought. Five months until colour and sunshine flooded back into the countryside. She had heard that Cambridge was beautiful in springtime: daffodils spreading in great yellow washes across the college garden. Bright cold mornings. Sunlight splashing onto the Cam. Life returning to the dead land.

  When is the world a carkasse?

  Stussman felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand on end as the question suddenly snapped back at her. An idea. A distant corner of her memory began to fill with the light of recognition. Could it be?

  She took her book of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets and flicked impatiently to page twenty-one. There it was. ‘A Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day.’ She tried to remain calm: had she guessed correctly?

  It was a poem about loss, transformation and the author’s longing for annihilation. However, it was the title and setting of the piece that had sparked Stussman’s interest: both focused on a specific day. Carefully, anxious not to embrace any premature conclusions, she picked up a pen and began to read the poem, making notes on each verse as she went:

  ’Tis the yeare’s midnight, and it is the dayes

  Lucies, who scarce seaven hours herself unmaskes

  The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks

  Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes

  ‘Today is St Lucy’s Day, the darkest day of the year, and there are scarce seven hours of sunlight,’ Stussman scribbled onto her notepad.

  The world’s whole sap is sunke

  The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk

  Whither, as to the beds-feet, life
is shrunk

  Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh

  Compared to me, who am their Epitaph.

  ‘The world is dry and lifeless, having drunk the life-giving balm that supports it. Life itself is shrunken, dead and buried.’ Stussman’s pen scratched against the paper.

  Study me then, you who shall lovers be

  At the next world, that is, at the next spring

  For I am every dead thing

  In whom love wrought new Alchemie

  For his art did expresse

  A quintessence even from nothingness

  ‘I am every dead thing in whom love transformed ugliness into spiritual purity. Love, the great alchemist, extracted a quintessential life-force from me even though I am a nothingness.’

  From dull privations, and leane emptinesse

  He ruin’d mee and I am rebegot

  Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

  ‘Destroyed by love, I am now reborn of things that are nothing: absence, darkness, death.’ Did the killer think he was some sort of alchemist? Stussman was annoyed the thought hadn’t occurred to her already.

  All others from all things, draw all that’s good

  Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they being have

  I, by loves limbecke, am the grave

  Of all that’s nothing.

  ‘All other living things have a form and a soul, but through love’s limbecke …’ Stussman paused for a second. What was a limbecke? She opened a reference book and sought a definition. There it was: a limbecke was the vessel in which the actual process of alchemy – the transformation of base things into gold – supposedly took place.

  Did the killer think that the murdered women were the limbecke for his own terrible alchemy? Were they the vessels in which his basest thoughts were converted into something pure and valuable?

  Oft a flood

  Have wee two wept, and so

  Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

  To be two chaosses, when we did show

  Care to ought else; and often absences

  Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

  ‘Whenever Donne or his lover thought of anything except each other, they cried a flood that drowned the world. They resembled the chaos that preceded the birth of the universe. Separation from each other turned them both into carcasses.’

  Stussman noted the latest appearance of the notion of a flood drowning the world: there were similar references in each of the four poems that the killer had cited.

  But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

  Of the first nothing, the Elixir grown;

  ‘Donne distinguishes between an “ordinary nothing”, meaning the mere absence of something and the “first nothing”, the quintessential nothing that existed before the birth of the universe.’

  Were I a man, that I were one,

  I needs must know; I should preferred

  If I were any beast

  Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

  And love, All, all some properties invest

  If I an ordinary nothing were

  As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

  ‘He outlines the order of nature below man: animals, plants and stones, claiming that even these lesser creatures are invested with properties such as emotion. If the author were an ordinary nothing he too would possess these characteristics.’

  Enjoy your summer, all

  Since shee enjoyes her long night’s festival

  Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

  This houre her Vigill and her Eve, since this

  Both the yeare’s and the daye’s deep midnight is.

  ‘Donne says he has become a quintessential nothing: the absolute nothingness of pre-creation. He will not be renewed. So on the festival of St Lucy, the longest and darkest night of the year, he prepares to join the dead woman.’

  When is the world a carkasse? When had death and grief sucked the very life from the soil itself? Now she knew. As far as Donne was concerned it was St Lucy’s Day, the year’s midnight: the night he mourned the death of his wife during childbirth. The very substance of the poem, its central conceit and argumentative logic, drew their strength from the day on which the piece had been conceived.

  Timing.

  Stussman checked her calendar: the longest night of the year was in December. She ran her finger along each of the days. There it was: 21 December. The beginning of winter.

  ‘Eight days from today,’ she said aloud, scaring herself.

  She paused. 21 December. It didn’t seem right. She had written critiques of the poem before and the date didn’t sound familiar.

  ‘Shit!’ She suddenly remembered and, cursing her stupidity, turned to the back of the Songs and Sonnets. Stussman found the footnotes that accompanied ‘A Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day’:

  ‘Note 2. Saint Lucy’s Day was regarded by Donne and his contemporaries as the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. Prior to the reform of the calendar in 1752, St Lucy’s Day was 13 December, the day on which the sun entered Capricorn, the sign of the goat.’

  13 December. Today. The world is a carkasse on St Lucy’s Day. Today is St Lucy’s Day.

  Stussman felt a hot stab of excitement. She stood and pulled down her copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable from a high shelf. On page 376 she found the entry she was looking for:

  ‘St Lucy, the patron saint of people with eye afflictions.’

  Stussman read on and the story came back to her. Lucy of Syracuse had been blessed with beautiful eyes. She had plucked them out to deter an eager suitor rather than break her vow of chastity. God had rewarded her with a place in paradise.

  Stussman sat back in her chair, shaking with nervous excitement. She felt sure that the murderer of Elizabeth Drury and Lucy Harrington was going to kill himself.

  51

  He was not awake but he was cognizant. Spinning in his own head. There were noises around him. People speaking, clattering metal on metal, electronic humming. He couldn’t open his eyes. A sheet of light lay across his eyelids. He was conscious; flailing his arms and legs. Voices. People holding him down. Fragments of memory nibbling at him: the cottage, the clifftop, Lucy Harrington. Disjointed thoughts and folded logic. Where was he?

  Pain. He was aware of pain. So at least he wasn’t dead. His head throbbed. There was a kind of bruised tightness in his chest. A needle in his wrist spread dull pain up the length of his arm. He was exhausted, swimming at the bottom of a bright white ocean. Creatures gnawing at him, eating him from the inside out. So much pain. Was he dying? Flailing now in impotent waking panic. People all around him again. A prick of pain on his arm. Injection. He relaxed slowly, thoughts swirling, eyes staring at him.

  He could not move. He could not see. He could smell. There were different smells. Perfume, soap, antiseptic. Was he floating in a bath? Was he being reborn in this agony? Perhaps he had never lived at all and had merely dreamed his life from the womb. Perhaps his mistakes were merely flickerings of the foetal imagination. Perhaps he had been given another chance to start from scratch.

  He knew the idea was absurd. New life could never be so lifeless. Every atom of his being felt jaded and polluted.

  He couldn’t open his eyes. Had they been torn from their sockets? No. There were changes in shade, flickers of bright and dark. Cooking. He could smell cooking: a distant, insistent greasy smell. And coffee. He could smell coffee.

  Coffee in the kitchen. Coffee and flowers: yellows and reds, washes of colour. Wind noisy at the glass. Darkness, violence. Julia crying. Heyer’s blood on his hands. Had he killed him? He had left him on the clifftop. Julia crying, beautiful even in her pain. An ambulance, people running around him. Machines beeping at him.

  Hospital. He was in hospital. And Dexter. Dexter was in danger – he had to call her. Had to tell her.

  Something over his mouth. He cannot speak. There
is pain again. Torture in his chest, like a butcher chopping meat from the inside out. Chop. Chop. Make it stop. Make it stop.

  Activity: people running, shouting. Machine beeping louder. Was he dying? Don’t accept it. Fight it. Must speak to Alison. Danger.

  John Underwood grunted something into his oxygen mask. Another needle pierced the skin of his arm. Darkness.

  Part IV

  Strange Connections

  52

  February 1945

  Tottenham, London

  Rose had laid on an impressive spread, considering the meagre resources. Violet Frayne crunched her third cucumber sandwich of the morning and washed it down with a gulp of sugary tea. It was a comfortable room. Neatly presented, without the clutter of ornaments that Violet always found so distasteful in the homes of others. Rose had bought a couple of prints since Violet’s last visit: both were of composers, Mozart and Bach. They had been strategically placed above the piano. Perhaps Rose found inspiration in their black-eyed gaze.

  Elizabeth had finally fallen asleep in her crib after squawking and yowling for over an hour. Violet found her baby exhausting sometimes and was grateful when her sister had the idea of placing a drop of brandy in the baby’s milk. It had worked like a dream and Violet made a mental note to intoxicate Elizabeth whenever she played up in future.

  Violet scanned Rose’s book collection. It covered an entire wall and contained many first editions and beautifully bound collections of poetry and drama. Her own collection back in Bolden seemed rather threadbare in comparison. She chanced upon a copy of Macbeth, superbly presented in black leather binding and delicate gold-leaf lettering. It was her favourite play. She returned to her chair and began, with considerable care, to turn the pages. She jumped slightly as Rose returned to the room bearing a freshly baked Dundee cake.