The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  Frayne didn’t bother.

  Violet Frayne didn’t ever find out about her grandson’s conviction. He kept it a closely guarded secret, paid the fine himself and destroyed all the free local papers when they fell through Violet’s letter box. It was an unnecessary precaution. By this time Violet Frayne’s vision had deteriorated so much that she was unable to read any newspaper print without a magnifying glass and she rarely bothered. Much to Frayne’s amusement, Bill Gowers had died of liver cancer the previous Christmas. In a way this was unfortunate, as Frayne had already developed his own plan for Bill Gowers. He had intended to inject concentrated sulphuric acid into the old man’s stomach if Violet had died before her husband. No need now. Nature had devised a far more uncomfortable and drawn-out torture and Bill Gowers was now just another contortion in the bark of the laburnum tree.

  Frayne had escaped prison but at a cost. He now had a criminal record. When he came to realize his great conceit he would have to be extremely cautious: eyes would be upon him. Mistakes would prove very expensive. Planning would be crucial and the experience he had gained would be useful. Timing would be the variable. He would know when the correct moment arrived. Until then he was content to wait, to prepare.

  And to dream.

  61

  Dexter was suddenly conscious. Her pain centres were firing messages across her brain. She was lying on her side in total darkness. Pain everywhere. She tried to move but something tightened against her neck. Where was she? She couldn’t see. Had he taken her eyes? Had he blinded her? No. Her eyes were stinging with dust. She struggled to remain calm and forced her body to relax. Her hands and feet were bound and there was cord around her neck. She had tape across her mouth. Again she tried to move, again the noose began to choke her. She got the message and lay perfectly still.

  Think rationally. She tried to brush aside her discomfort and focus on where she was. The floor was cold and she guessed it was concrete. It was dusty too and her eyes were starting to water now. Was he watching her? Was he standing in the blackness, staring at her? She desperately tried to distinguish shapes and listened for tell-tale noises such as breathing. Nothing. She could see his face in her mind clearly enough. Thin and bony: well-defined cheekbones and a shock of dark hair. He had looked pale, as if his angry eyes had drained the life and colour from his skin. He looked like a ghost.

  Where could she be? Concrete floor. Total silence. A warehouse, maybe? A garage? She didn’t think so. The room didn’t smell of oil or machinery. If anything, it smelled of old books: dry and musty. There was no draught. He had gagged her, so he must have been concerned that someone might hear her cries. She found that strangely reassuring. There must be people nearby. Somewhere above her, away in the distance, she heard a car start and slowly accelerate.

  Maybe she was in his house. On a residential road. If she was in a house she had to be in a cellar or a shed. She guessed it was the former. Dexter sensed there was a low ceiling above her: the room was tight and airless.

  Underwood had been right. The killer wanted her alive for something. What had the inspector said? He wasn’t performing, he was educating. Why had he chosen to educate her? Her mind sought explanations. She had found him at Elizabeth Drury’s house; surprised him. Hadn’t Stussman said that the metaphysical poets valued unexpectedness as a form of wit? Perhaps the killer valued her intelligence or appreciated the stream of connections that she must have made to find him so quickly. Did that mean that he wasn’t going to kill her? She doubted it.

  The bindings on her hands were slightly less painful than those around her ankles and Dexter gradually began to move her wrists in an attempt to loosen the tape further. The cord tugged at her neck as she did so but she persevered. It would take time but she was confident that eventually she could work her hands free. She also used her tongue to lick the inside of the masking tape that sealed her mouth. It tasted disgusting but it slowly began to loosen as she moistened the adhesive with saliva. It was exhausting, sweaty work and she had to rest for breath every thirty seconds or so.

  She was confident that she was alone in the room. Why had he left her? A car had just driven off. Was it the killer? If so, where had he gone? How long did she have? Concentrate, Alison. She began to work her wrists once more.

  62

  Heather Stussman’s telephone rang at three p.m. The noise smashed through the tense silence like an exploding hand grenade. She sensed bad news.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘When is the world a carkasse?’ said Crowan Frayne.

  The voice chilled her to the marrow. ‘Today,’ she replied. She looked out of the window across the old quad. She had an instinctive sense that he was close: as if the hairs on the back of her neck had all suddenly stood on end. There was nobody in sight. Most of the students were at lectures.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘13 December is St Lucies Day. The yeare’s midnight.’

  There was a pause. Frayne seemed to be digesting the information. Eventually the voice came again: dry and rasping.

  ‘Are you looking out of your window?’

  She froze in horror. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Crowan Frayne took a deep breath: it sounded like a wave whispering against dry pebbles. ‘See how the thirsty earth has withered and shrunk as to the beds feet?’

  Stussman understood the reference to the poem. Hippocrates said that a dying man will huddle at the foot of his bed. Donne had used it in his St Lucy’s Day poem. She looked again at the quadrangle. There was no one there: he couldn’t possibly see her.

  ‘I suppose you’re every dead thing?’ she replied after a moment.

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘Is that meant to frighten me?’ She tried to hide the tremor in her voice.

  ‘No. To help you. Listen to the dead inside you. We are only animations of forgotten souls. Listen to their cries, their anguish. They will give you perspective. They will teach you pity.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  There was another pause. Stussman wondered what he was doing: playing with himself, maybe. ‘What’s the matter?’ she added. ‘Can’t you think of anything scary to say?’

  ‘Are you acquainted with Detective Sergeant Alison Dexter?’ he asked softly.

  Stussman hesitated. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alison Dexter has short dark brown hair and green eyes that glower like a cat’s. Her blood tastes of sugar for a second; then of rust.’

  ‘Is she with you now?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Let me speak to her.’

  ‘I don’t think I can allow that.’

  ‘Is she alive? Have you hurt her?’

  ‘Sergeant Dexter has the ability to make extraordinary connections,’ said Crowan Frayne. ‘I’m sure she is doing so as we speak. She is unable to do much else.’

  ‘Listen to me.’ Stussman was trying frantically to think of an angle. ‘Killing a cop is heavy shit. You think you’re in trouble now. If you kill her they will tear you apart, mister. No trial, no jury. You won’t make it as far as court. They will crucify you. Every policeman in the country will want your head.’

  ‘With your cooperation, Sergeant Dexter need not come to any lasting harm.’

  ‘My cooperation?’

  ‘I want you to come to the war memorial in New Bolden Cemetery.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I will explain it to you when you arrive.’

  ‘I don’t think so, buster.’

  ‘Alison Dexter has pretty green eyes, fiercely intelligent. She also has surprisingly delicate hands for a policewoman.’

  ‘Don’t threaten me.’

  ‘Similarly, if you are not at the war memorial in New Bolden cemetery at five o’clock today I will tie Sergeant Dexter to a table and cut out her left eye. While she screams into her gag, I will tell her that you refused to help her. She may pass out with the pain, of course: I imagine peeling back her eyelids will cause considerable distress. But then, Sergeant Dexter strikes me as a parti
cularly strong-willed individual. She may remain awake for some time. She may even have the unique privilege of seeing her own eye pulled from its socket.’

  ‘You are a very sick fuck.’

  ‘I will then send the eye to a national newspaper – probably a lurid tabloid – with an accompanying note explaining that my actions were inspired by your radical text Reconstructing Donne – rather in the way that The Beatles apparently inspired Charles Manson – and that you had the chance to save Sergeant Dexter but refused. I am uncertain how the university would react but your celebrity would outlive both of us. If I am arrested as a result of your actions I shall instruct my solicitor to post a parcel that I have prepared and entrusted to him, again to a major tabloid newspaper. It will have a similar effect.’

  Stussman was being backed into a corner. If Frayne meant what he said, she’d be ruined.

  ‘How do I know that you won’t hurt me?’ she said. ‘I’d be crazy to swap my life for Dexter’s.’ She would play along with him, then call the police.

  ‘That may not be necessary. If you trust in your knowledge, if you are confident in your own work, if you are certain of the arguments you put forward with such intellectual force in your book, then you will not come to any harm.’

  ‘That isn’t very reassuring.’

  ‘If you contact the police, I shall know. If you are accompanied or followed to the war memorial I shall know. In my house I have a large flask of concentrated sulphuric acid. If you attempt to deceive me in any way I will remove Sergeant Dexter’s eye and then drop acid into the socket, using a pipette. I will then apply the acid to her face, her hands, her nipples and Lord knows where else. I guess that her heart will eventually succumb to the agony but who knows how long that will take?’

  ‘If I come you’ll kill me, won’t you?’ She was floundering now.

  ‘Once I have finished with Alison I shall visit you in any case. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘This is your opportunity to live. If you try and fuck me around I will show you every dead thing that crawls around inside you, shits behind your eyes and slithers in your blood. I will take great pleasure and much time in showing you. When you leave the college today, you should assume that I am watching you all the way. I shall know if you are playing with me and I promise that I will find agonies for you and Sergeant Dexter that will burst your brains.’

  ‘I get the picture.’

  ‘And I am rebegot,’ said Crowan Frayne, ‘of absence, darkness, death, things which are not.’

  The line died suddenly and Stussman put the phone down. Her hand hovered over the receiver. She knew she should call the police. But what if the killer was nearby? What if he was a policeman? The idea made her shiver: there was a policeman outside her door. If you are accompanied or followed to the war memorial, I shall know, the killer had said. That meant he must already be in Cambridge, unless he was just trying to frighten her to make sure she’d comply.

  He had said that he was planning to visit her. That this was her chance to live. Calling the police would be a huge risk. He would kill Alison Dexter for sure and offer Stussman’s name to the tabloid press. She could not let that happen. Heather Stussman had built her academic reputation piece by exhausting piece. It had been a tortuous process, driven only by her instinctive desire to succeed, like a salmon swimming against the flow of a thick black river. It was her entire life. Without her reputation what would she do? Go back to Wisconsin, probably, but then what? She would be unemployable and, worse than that, she would be notorious.

  If you are certain of your arguments then you will not come to any harm. He would say that, though, wouldn’t he? Stussman mused. She thought again of ‘A Nocturnall on St Lucies Day’. The killer had quoted from it again as he hung up: ‘And I am rebegot of absence, darkness, death, things which are not.’ He was obsessed with annihilation, self-destruction, nothingness. If, as Stussman had previously suspected, he planned to kill himself, perhaps she could encourage him in the act. She sat down at her desk and wrote on a piece of college notepaper:

  ‘Murderer of Harrington and Drury asked me to meet him today at five p.m., New Bolden Cemetery, War Memorial. He has Sergeant Dexter and has threatened to kill her if I do not attend. I believe he plans to kill himself.’

  She folded the note carefully inside an envelope, sealed it, addressed it to Sergeant Harrison, New Bolden CID and wrote the phone number of the Incident Room at the top edge of the envelope. It wasn’t much of a contingency plan but it was better than nothing. Stussman opened the door of her rooms and smiled down at her blue-uniformed sentry.

  ‘I’m going to drop this letter at the porter’s lodge,’ she said. ‘Then I am going to the college library for an hour or two. I’ll be quite safe. It’s within college grounds and there will be plenty of students there.’

  ‘I’m supposed to stay with you, Dr Stussman.’ PC Jarvis was young and eager not to screw up.

  ‘There’s really no need. No offence, but I won’t be able to work with you sitting next to me. Wouldn’t you be better off here? In case he calls or turns up, I mean. He’s not likely to attack me in the library in front of the entire college.’

  ‘I guess not. All right, Dr Stussman, but please don’t leave the college site without telling me first. Would you like me to walk with you to the lodge?’

  ‘You’re very kind but there’s no need. I’ll leave the room open. Help yourself to tea.’ She smiled her most dazzling smile at him and PC Jarvis melted like hot butter.

  Stussman hurried down to the porter’s lodge. The air was bitterly cold. Tiny flakes of snow drifted across the stone quadrangle like ash from a distant bonfire. The newly refurbished lodge was centrally heated and the warmth enfolded her as she stepped inside. Johnson, the head porter, was hanging room keys on the board behind the front desk.

  ‘Johnson, can I ask you an important favour?’

  The head porter twisted the right side of his mouth into a sardonic knot. He put down his pipe on the wooden counter. ‘That’s why I am here, Dr Stussman.’

  She handed him the envelope. He read the name of the addressee with interest.

  ‘I have to leave the college for a couple of hours on police business. You’ve heard the rumours, I’m sure.’

  ‘Every one of them.’

  ‘Good. You’ll understand the importance, then.’ She looked Johnson in the eye, using her toughest stare. ‘Listen. If I have not called you by six p.m. today I want you to call Sergeant Harrison on the number I have given and read him the contents of the envelope.’

  ‘Open it, you mean?’

  ‘Obviously. This is a matter of life and death, Mr Johnson. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.’

  The head porter nodded and carefully placed the envelope in the breast pocket of his blazer.

  ‘What about the young police gentleman on your staircase?’

  ‘He’s in my room. We … we are expecting the killer to call.’

  ‘Very well, Dr Stussman.’ He tapped his pocket and winked at her. ‘I shall wait for your call.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Johnson. I knew I could depend on you.’

  ‘Always, madam.’

  Stussman nodded at him and then stepped back outside. Into the oven.

  63

  Marty Farrell had been lifting prints from the New Bolden library computer for nearly four hours. It was a painstaking process. The machine was covered with dozens of latent prints. He started with the keyboard, carefully dusting and brushing black non-magnetic powder onto the surface of each of the keys to highlight the tell-tale oils in the fingerprints. He lifted the prints from the surface by pressing adhesive tape against the powder. Farrell then used a special camera to photograph the imprints on the tape. The procedure took time and he knew that time was a critical factor now. There were some faint latent fingerprints that the powder was unable to clarify. On these he used a small laser that caused the perspiration in the prints to glow a mysterious yell
ow. These too were photographed.

  The problem was not so much finding the prints as separating them. The library computer was used by the general public and dozens of greasy-fingered people had used it. The fingerprints were smudged and overlaid on top of each other on many of the keys. The smudging was so bad on the mouse buttons that lifting individual prints was virtually impossible. Still, Marty Farrell persevered and by 4.30 p.m. he had lifted and photographed seventeen reasonably uncorrupted partial and whole prints.

  He knew that attempting to identify each of them in turn could take hours so he acted on the suggestion that Harrison had made to him that morning. On a piece of paper Farrell wrote down:

  ELIZABETH DRURY

  JOHN DONNE

  He then cross-referenced the constituent letters of the two names with the locations where he had found each of the prints. This allowed him to prioritize more effectively. He would concentrate his attention on the more uncommon letters from which he had lifted a fingerprint. He decided to start with Z, H, D, R, and Y. In total, he had taken nine partials from those letters. He might not be able to secure the court-required sixteen-point match but at this stage that wouldn’t be necessary. At this stage he just needed a name. And a break.

  Marty Farrell scanned the photographed prints from Z, H, D, R and Y into his computer and, brushing the sweat from his brow, began to look for possible matches in the police fingerprint records with the two whorl-patterned prints he had lifted from the Z key. The clock marched inexorably towards five o’clock.