The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  Was she going mad? Maybe she’d been mad to come to England in the first place. Heather Stussman had never really known fear before: a certain nervousness when her academic articles were published, maybe, but nothing like this. She had taken a small carving knife from her kitchenette and placed it in the pocket of her cardigan as a precaution. She held it with her right hand. The steel felt cold against her skin. There was another knife under the pillow of her bed. They didn’t reassure her. Neither did fresh-faced Constable Dawson who sat reading the newspaper outside the door to her rooms. In the US cops carried guns.

  The college clock bonged once outside her window: it was nine-thirty. She would give them an hour. Then she would call again.

  56

  February 1967

  New Bolden

  Elizabeth Frayne died in childbirth. She had a weak heart that collapsed on her during labour. No one had known of its weakness and the doctors had been unprepared. One said it was a miracle that they managed to save the baby. Elizabeth was unmarried: she had kept the identity of the child’s father a secret.

  The funeral was simple and immediate. Rain whipped bitterly across New Bolden Cemetery, whirling grit around the grave. Droplets of water gathered on the funeral casket, merging and rolling off the sides like tears as Violet watched. The open ground yawned in front of her. Violet wished it would suck her down in her daughter’s place. The ceremony was over in a matter of minutes. Two of Elizabeth’s friends from the library attended. Violet did not invite them back home afterwards.

  She collected her baby grandson from her neighbours and took the boy inside. He was big: over nine pounds at birth and much heavier now. He burbled as she nursed him. How would she manage? Twenty-two years of struggle and she was back where she started: holding a baby and wondering what on earth she could do. Twenty-two years and she had made no progress. God had a dark sense of humour, heaping grief upon grief on her shoulders. She looked at the baby and thought for an instant that it was no more pathetic, no more vulnerable and helpless than she was: a molecule of water in a vast directionless tidal wave. She banished the thought.

  She had agonized over whether to have the baby adopted. She was middle-aged, she told herself; she didn’t have the energy to start over again. She had faced disaster three times before: when she had become pregnant with Elizabeth, when Arthur had been killed and when she had lost her eye. On each occasion she had looked deep into the abyss and, from somewhere, had summoned the will to fight on.

  The baby started to cry and she stroked his brow softly. When Arthur had died she had come to believe that there was no God. However, her logical schoolteacher’s mind quickly argued her out of that position. If there was no God then all life was meaningless – Arthur’s existence and death had been meaningless. But she knew that in the happiness they had shared, there was meaning. There had to be meaning here too, she reasoned as she stared down at her grandson. Perhaps she hadn’t been tested enough. Perhaps this was another test of will and belief. She would fight again. She would defy her interfering God.

  She thought of her daughter, dead and gone. No way to say sorry, no way to say goodbye. They had grown apart. Violet had got married some nine years previously. It had proved to be a mixed blessing: an arrangement born more of necessity and mutual convenience than affection. Elizabeth had hated her new father, his coarseness and the smell of alcohol that followed him around the house, his rages and his brooding, his alternating gentleness and violence. A week after her eighteenth birthday, Elizabeth had left home and started work at the Bolden library. Violet felt a sudden rush of guilt and loneliness. Elizabeth was gone.

  Violet carried the baby into the kitchen and rested him in his cot. She could hear her husband snoring in the lounge. She imagined the newspapers and the mess of food and dirty plates. Bill Gowers had been a merchant seaman during the war. She had met him at a Remembrance Day service in Bolden. They had become friendly and started meeting for drinks. Bill had worked on the Atlantic convoys during the war, just as Arthur had done. Violet sat quietly and listened while Bill drank whisky and told his stories: of U-boat attacks, of black Atlantic skies strewn with glittering stars, of storms and of waves that smashed down upon the decks as if they were the wrath of God Himself, of burned and lost ships, of friends with daft nicknames, of fear and resolution.

  She realized years later, lying in the darknesses of their marriage, that Bill’s stories had made her feel closer to Arthur; for a while, they closed the gap that his death had opened. They had allowed her to enter an imagined world, where she could seek out the only man she had truly loved. When she finally realized that Arthur wasn’t hiding behind Bill’s reminiscences, the stories became a horror to her and she punished her new husband with a coldness that he couldn’t understand.

  A name. The baby had to be given a name. The reality dawned on her out of the blue. It was her first responsibility. She sat on a hard kitchen chair and rocked the cradle as she thought. ‘Arthur’ was her first choice but Bill would not appreciate that. He knew a little about Arthur. There was no point turning her husband instinctively against the baby.

  Violet considered the names of some English kings: Richard, Henry, George. They were all possibilities but none of them appealed particularly. Then an idea dropped into her head. Arthur’s surname had been ‘Crowan’: Able Seaman Arthur Crowan. She had never told this to Bill. She had been half worried that Bill might actually have known him personally: Violet hadn’t wanted Bill intruding on her imagined world. Arthur’s blood was in the baby, it was only right that his name was used. ‘Crowan Frayne’: she liked that. It fused her with Arthur.

  Once she was dead, Crowan Frayne would be the only proof that her happiness with Arthur had meant anything, or had even taken place at all. She decided that Crowan was the meaning, the purpose that was hidden in her sadness. She resolved to throw her heart, mind and soul into the child. His success would be her revenge on a vengeful universe.

  57

  Marty Farrell, the New Bolden scene-of-crime officer, approached the front desk of the library and asked for Sergeant Dexter. He carried a standard police fingerprinting kit and water ran off his waterproof jacket onto the floor. The young female librarian looked at him blankly for a second and then remembered.

  ‘Oh, you’ve come about the computer terminal.’

  ‘That’s right. Is Sergeant Dexter around?’

  ‘You should speak to Dan, really – he was dealing with her.’ Dan was standing guard over the newly covered keyboard and computer screen. Farrell nodded and walked over.

  ‘I’m Marty Farrell from New Bolden police.’ He waved his ID at Dan, ‘I understand you’ve been dealing with my sergeant.’

  ‘Alison,’ said Dan. ‘Yes, although I don’t know where she’s got to. She told me to isolate this terminal and keep it covered up. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Probably.’

  A small group of curious onlookers had gathered to watch. Farrell looked around for Dexter. Where the hell was she? The useless tart. Doing her bloody make-up, most likely. He couldn’t work under these conditions. Besides, it was boiling hot in there. He made a quick decision.

  ‘I’ll need to take this terminal back to the station with me.’

  Dan looked surprised. ‘Is it evidence? Has there been a crime?’

  Farrell ignored him. ‘Is there a back entrance to this building? Like a delivery entrance?’

  ‘Absolutely. Access is from the car park.’

  ‘OK. I’ll bring my van right up to that entrance. I don’t want to compromise the computer by getting it wet – and it is pissing down out there. I’m going to disconnect the terminal and then bag each component part individually. Then we’ll take them to the delivery door and we’ll put the bags straight into my van. Understood?’

  ‘No problemo.’

  Farrell knelt and opened his box of equipment. He took out four large plastic evidence bags and put them on the table next to the computer. ‘Did Sergeant Dexter
say when she would be back?’

  ‘No, she just ran out with her mobile about forty minutes ago. I haven’t seen her since. She’s like that, isn’t she? Impulsive, I mean.’

  Farrell ignored the question and handed Dan a typewritten form. ‘This is your receipt. I fill out the top section but you’ll need to sign it before I leave. We’ll contact you when we’ve finished with the item.’

  ‘I’ll have to get the chief librarian. I’m not an official signatory,’ said Dan sadly.

  Farrell took a deep breath and turned his attention to the computer. It took him fifteen minutes to secure each of the major items: the screen, the keyboard and the hard drive. He also bagged the mouse and the mouse mat. Dan helped him carry the bags to the back of the library and Farrell made a dash for his van across the rainswept car park. Backing up to the entrance, he saw Dexter’s car parked opposite the back wall of the library. The driver’s door was open.

  Farrell quickly loaded the evidence bags into the airtight containers inside his van and then jogged over to the car. It was definitely Dexter’s. Blue Mondeo. T69 MPF. He always remembered her licence plate as its initials were MPF, like his own: Martin Peter Farrell. Farrell looked in the driver’s door and then looked around; Dexter was nowhere to be seen. ‘Dozy bird,’ he muttered to himself and was about to slam the door shut when he noticed blood on the driver’s seat and on the inside of the door.

  58

  June 1978

  He was an intelligent child; a quick learner. He had an aptitude for language and music that Violet knew had come from the Fraynes. He had a shock of dark hair that shone when it was brushed and furious eyes that constantly sought connections and explanations. Crowan received good school reports, although some teachers expressed a concern that his quiet nature had made him something of an outsider. Violet wasn’t concerned. Her grandson was intelligent and healthy: he had ideas and interests that were beyond his years. They would sit together reading at night, while Bill Gowers watched television and drunk himself to sleep. They would read Shakespeare, each taking different parts and performing to each other.

  Crowan liked the ‘seven ages of man’ speech from As You Like It. He particularly relished the infant ‘mewling and puking’ in his nurse’s arms. Crowan spat the words out with such venomous clarity that Violet couldn’t help but smile. She taught Crowan to play the piano that she had inherited from Rose and gradually guided him through her sister’s book collection. He was too young to enjoy Dickens and Hardy and his sallies into Nicholas Nickleby and Jude the Obscure never lasted longer than a couple of chapters. However, he enjoyed the rhythms and colour of poetry: the rhymes made the poems easier to remember. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was his favourite, although Violet steered him gently but insistently towards Wordsworth and Donne.

  Donne grabbed his attention. The language often confused him but he liked the simple images at the centre of some of the poems. He could recreate the picture in his mind and then work the language around it. Violet understood this and deliberately chose poems with a vivid conceit at their heart to help her grandson understand more rapidly. Crowan especially liked ‘The Flea’. Its simple, colourful images became rooted in his mind and he listened rapt as Violet explained the poem to him. ‘The poet is annoyed with his girlfriend because she won’t kiss him. So he points out a flea to her and says that she let the flea bite her so she should at least allow him to kiss her! Like this.’ Crowan giggled and retracted as Violet pursed her lips and tried to kiss him. ‘Marke but this flea, and mark in this/How little that which thou deny’st me is/ Mee it suck’d first, and now it sucks theel And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.’

  Violet made some unpleasant sucking noises for dramatic impact.

  ‘So do fleas suck blood?’ Crowan asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s their food.’

  ‘Like chips?’

  ‘Just like chips. So, you see, because the flea has bitten both Donne and his girlfriend, their two bloods are mingled together inside it.’

  ‘Like a baby.’

  Not for the first time, Violet Frayne was surprised at her grandson’s perceptiveness. His mind was so quick to make connections, to find the meaning behind text and ideas.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said softly, ‘and Donne says to the girl that if she kills the flea by crushing it, then she will actually be killing the three of them: Though use make thee apt to kill mee/Let not to this selfe murder added bee/And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three.’

  Bill Gowers appeared at the kitchen door. ‘You’ll make a poofter out of that boy,’ he hiccoughed and opened the fridge.

  Violet tensed. ‘Don’t you dare speak like that in front of him.’

  ‘What’s a poofter?’ asked Crowan Frayne.

  ‘A pansy. A shirt-lifter. Where’s the bleeding cheese?’ Gowers rummaged in the fridge and eventually found some Cheddar. He cut a hunk of bread from a half-loaf and slapped on some margarine.

  ‘A pansy’s a flower, isn’t it, Granny? Like a violet.’ Crowan was confused.

  ‘That’s right, darling,’ Violet replied. ‘It’s a little flower.’ She fired a withering look at Gowers as he added a slab of cheese to his doorstep of bread.

  Gowers snorted with derision. ‘Hah! Flowers! That’s right. Little flowers they are. We had a load of them in the Navy and didn’t they smell pretty?’ He bumped into Crowan Frayne as he turned. ‘Get out of my fucking way, you’re always cluttering.’

  ‘Don’t you touch him, you drunken oaf,’ Violet snarled, ‘or, God help me, I’ll—’

  ‘What?’ shouted Gowers. ‘What will you do? I’ve been blown up and sunk. Splashing about in the Atlantic in the middle of the bleeding night with the skin burned off me hands. There’s not much you can do that’d scare me.’

  ‘Just go away.’ Violet felt a cold fury at the man. ‘Let us be.’

  Gowers showed his hands to Frayne. The boy had seen the burns before but they still made him shiver. ‘See these, nancy? Adolf Hitler did that and he didn’t bloody scare me either.’ Gowers returned to the lounge and slammed the door behind him. Violet shuddered as she heard the television volume increase.

  ‘Don’t cry, Granny,’ said Crowan Frayne. He wondered why she only seemed to cry out of one eye.

  ‘I’m all right, darling.’ Violet brushed the tears from her face and swallowed her pain. ‘Right, then. Where did we get up to?’

  ‘The second stanza,’ said Crowan helpfully, looking again at his book of poems, beautifully bound in black leather. ‘He’s just told her not to crush the flea.’

  ‘Thank you. Let’s finish this one off, then.’ Violet continued explaining the poem to Crowan but by now he was only half listening. He was thinking of ways to kill Bill Gowers.

  That night Crowan Frayne dreamed that he was trapped inside a flea – swimming in different kinds of blood. Ladies’ blood smelled of pansies: men’s blood smelled of whisky and feet. It washed over him, pouring into his throat. His hands banged against the walls of the flea’s stomach; cloistered in these living walls of jet. He was like a baby, floating in blood. Nancy baby. But he couldn’t be born because he didn’t have a mummy. He felt a great force lift the flea in the air. Blood and fluid swilled against him and his head smashed against the flea’s stomach lining. The flea was being crushed – he couldn’t breathe. The sides of the flea ruptured and a great pressure bore down on him. Cruel and sodaine hast thou since purpled thy nail in blood of innocence? He had been crushed, he had lost his shape. Now he was just blood falling through the air. And he didn’t smell of anything.

  After leaving the Merchant Navy, Bill Gowers had worked at Bolden station until it was demolished and rebuilt as New Bolden Parkway in 1965. Gowers was still fond of the railways and each morning would take a long walk along the edge of the track to the South Bolden signal box. He enjoyed talking to the engineers and often stopped for a cup of tea and a bun with Albert Faulks, the signalman. Crowan Frayne often asked Gowers if he could
walk with him but Gowers always refused. So Crowan would follow him. He would wait in bed until he heard Gowers slam the front door. Then he’d dress quickly and follow the old man outside.

  It was about a four-mile round trip and it took Gowers over three hours, including his stop for tea. Crowan would stay back about a hundred metres: he knew that Gowers’s eyes were bad and he was unlikely to spot Crowan at such a distance. The route took them through the old village allotments, then past the cemetery and on to the railway line. Crowan liked the railway: the rush and energy of the trains, the scrunch of granite shale underfoot. He watched Gowers’s awkward, laborious progress and wondered what it would be like to push the old man under a train. Would he fly into the air or be pulled underneath and sliced apart?

  The June morning was bright and fresh but Crowan preferred the security of darkness. He felt conspicuous in the daylight. He held back further, often losing sight of the old man as the footpath twisted through, around and behind the allotments. Crowan wasn’t concerned. There was a film of dew on the leaves like droplets of pearl, or tears: ‘Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares/Hither I come to seek the spring’. He liked Donne’s ‘Twicknam Garden’. Crowan ran his hand softly against the wet leaves, feeling the cold water evaporate against his skin. He rounded a corner in the path and came face to face with Bill Gowers.

  ‘What are you doing, you little bastard?’ Gowers snarled.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re following me. I’ll brain you with me stick.’ He waved his walking stick angrily at Crowan. ‘Can’t you give me any peace? Haven’t you messed my life up enough?’

  ‘I’m going home.’ Crowan turned and started to walk away. Gowers lashed at the back of his leg with the stick. Crowan Frayne felt a rush of pain as he fell to the tarmac.