The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  64

  December 1999

  Violet Frayne’s final act had been to kiss her grandson’s forehead. She fell back and breathed a last, tired breath: her grey hair was spread out on the pillows of her hospital bed. Then she was gone. Crowan Frayne watched her closely. He had hoped to see her spirit quit her body with that final resigned breath. Instead he saw nothing and felt only the gradual relaxation of her grip on his hand. He was alone, absolutely without meaning. A nothingness without form or direction.

  He leaned forward and brushed his grandmother’s hair back from her face. Beside the bed were the flowers and plants that he had brought her. Crowan Frayne pulled some petals from the African violet and scattered them softly over the pillow. He reached for her treasured leather-bound book of Donne and turned to the page that he had selected for this moment. Sotto voce, below the hum of machines and the clatter of the ward, Crowan Frayne began to read from ‘The Extasie’:

  ‘Where like a pillow on a bed

  A Pregnant banke swel’d up to rest

  The violets reclining head

  Sat we two, one anothers best

  ‘Our hands were firmely cimented

  With a fast balme, which thence did spring

  Our eye beames twisted and did thread

  Our eyes upon one double string.’

  To his frustration, he could read no further. Tears welled up in his eyes and he squeezed them back, swallowing the pain in deep acid draughts as he always had. He had disappointed her in death as he had failed her in life. She was the intelligence: the angel that had moved his physical and intellectual cosmos. She had given the spheres their strange and beautiful music, put poetry into his darkest, most senseless thoughts, bound his thoughts with hers on one double string. Violet Frayne had fired the alchemy that was glowing now in his soul: Frayne could see the divine in the mundane, music behind the terrible vastness of space and time, celebration in desecration, the yoking of opposites. Wit in horror.

  Like a billion burning magnets, his thoughts sought connections. Some were unusual and disturbing, as if terrible predators swam in the dopamine and serotonin that connected his neural transmitters and receptors. Monsters hid between his cells and in the electrical pulses of his thoughts. What if they were the spirits? ‘As our blood labours to beget, Spirits … that subtile knot that makes us man,’ Donne had written. The spirits lived in human blood and communicated the brain’s instructions to the body. What if monsters, abominations of time and evolution, deformed and malignant, were the binders that united his mind with his body?

  The thought dug like a scalpel at the matter of his brain. Could he marshal those monsters to celebrate her? Could he use their alchemy to convert the banality and ugliness of the life she had endured into the rarefication of beauty that she deserved in death? When he had smashed the glass eyes he had turned her agonies inside out. He had snagged the monsters that dwelt in her blood and hauled them writhing to the surface. She had injected beauty into his soul and he had revealed her ugliness in return. He despised himself for that. He would make amends.

  Crowan Frayne kissed his dead grandmother’s hand and promised he would make her beautiful again.

  65

  ‘You’re a sick man, Mr Underwood,’ said Dr Barozzi as he read the inspector’s charts. ‘You are lucky to be alive.’

  ‘I know.’ Underwood’s head still swam with exhaustion and traces of drugs. Clarity was beginning to return, however, like fresh air circulating in a dark stuffy room.

  ‘You have had a minor heart attack. Your signs are now stable.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You have a severe infection of the pleural membrane in your left lung. This has put a huge strain on your cardiovascular system. How long have you had this lung infection?’

  ‘A long time.’ Underwood’s throat was dry and painful. It hurt to talk.

  ‘Six months?’

  ‘More.’

  ‘A year?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Dr Barozzi shook his head slowly. ‘Your left lung is a mess. It’s dog meat, to be blunt. You have let this go much too far. Men of your age have to take care of themselves. You have put your heart under terrible strain through your own negligence. It’s like taking the pin out of a hand grenade, then jumping up and down with it in your breast pocket.’ Barozzi smiled at his own imagery.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘We have put you on a course of powerful antibiotics. These will attack the infection in your lung but you will feel tired for some time. Your heart is weak and the strain of fighting this infection will take it out of you.’

  Underwood was floating away. He could feel exhaustion crawling through his veins like water through tissue paper.

  ‘I will be back to see you tomorrow.’ Barozzi reattached the chart board to the foot of Underwood’s bed. ‘I’ve left some papers by the side of your bed in case you feel like reading.’

  Underwood drifted off to sleep for a couple of minutes. He dreamed of his parents; less distant now than when they were alive. 28 September 1988 and 3 March 1989. Gone within six months of each other. He woke suddenly. Would he have killed Paul Heyer? Would he have kicked him over the cliff edge and watched him smash onto the rocks below?

  The killer of Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury was giggling at him, pulling the strings in the back of his head.

  He opened his eyes and looked over at the bedside cabinet. There was a small pile of newspapers: The Independent, the Daily Mail and the New Bolden Echo. Underwood reached over for the local newspaper. It was a week old. Lucy Harrington’s smiling face looked back at him from the front page: ‘Local Girl Strikes Gold’ boomed the headline happily.

  The killer was local, thought Underwood. He read this story. It surprised him and occasioned his actions. Why? The name. The killer liked John Donne. Lucy Harrington was a member of Donne’s coterie. He saw the name and got the idea. Why now, though? Underwood remembered that serial killers built and adapted their fantasies over time. Lucy Harrington didn’t give the murderer his idea. She occasioned it. Something about the story occasioned his fantasy. Occasioned his need to educate and explain.

  He tried to read the article that he had already read ten times at the station over the previous week. But his eyes failed him and he drifted away again, drugs lapping at his consciousness like waves on a lonely shore. Underwood dreamed he was walking with his parents on a pebbled beach. He threw pebbles into the sea, watching them skim across the waves. None of them sank into the water. They bounced over the wave tops until they faded out of sight, over the horizon. He looked at the pebble in his hand. It was an eye.

  66

  Dexter lay half-asleep in bloody exhaustion. She had loosened the bindings slightly but at a cost. Her wrists bled painfully and she felt no closer to manoeuvring herself free. She had been in the darkness for what seemed like hours. No one had come for her. Had the killer left her in the basement of a deserted house to rot and starve to death in the dark? The thought terrified her. A blow to the head would end things quickly. She would prefer that. She was brave, always had been. Crying alone and soundlessly in the dark terrified her. It was the terror of waiting to be born.

  67

  Heather Stussman took a taxi from Southwell College to Cambridge Station, then boarded a local train to New Bolden. She was alone.

  Crowan Frayne had watched Stussman board the train and had then driven at high speed, but within the speed limits, to New Bolden station. He beat her train there by five minutes. Stussman stepped out into the unfamiliar environment of New Bolden and immediately climbed into a minicab. Frayne followed at a distance, two cars back. He knew that she would be expecting him. No other cars appeared to be following her. Perhaps she would go through with it. He dared to dream.

  Once he was confident she was heading for the cemetery, Crowan Frayne accelerated past the minicab. He knew a short cut and found a quiet place to park his van. Following Stussman from Cambridge meant that he
hadn’t checked the cemetery. He would do that now.

  Stussman climbed from her minicab at the main entrance to the cemetery. She shivered in the dry cold of the gathering darkness. The driver had told her that the war memorial was in the centre of the site, a two-minute walk from the road. The red lights of the car flared briefly at her as the minicab braked, turned right along Station Road and disappeared. She was alone. She felt the cold steel of the carving knife in her coat pocket and walked through the cast-iron gates into New Bolden Cemetery.

  There was a path lined with imitation gas lamps that led into the heart of the graveyard. Stussman stepped briskly along the hazy yellow trail, her shoes crunching the gravel underfoot. It seemed to stretch endlessly into the darkness: there were black outlines of headstones all around that seemed to lean towards her, throwing strangely shaped shadows against the murmuring grass: angels and carved flowers, open Bibles and crosses. The wind moved silently through the naked trees and chilled stone. She looked behind her and ahead. She could see nobody. Fear pricked at her skin, together with the crisp air. He was out there, moving with her like a shadow in the textured blackness. She was illuminated like a good soul in hell.

  The war memorial loomed suddenly. Stussman’s heart hammered at her chest. She would give him five minutes. A train rattled and moaned in the near distance. She stood with her back against the cold marble of the monolith, felt the carved names of the dead press into her back. It was disrespectful, but at least it meant that no one could creep up behind her. If he came at her it would be from the front or the sides and she would have a second or two to draw the knife from her pocket.

  She knew that she had to be mad. Corning to this place was a terrible mistake. She checked her watch: 5.15. Johnson would call the police in forty-five minutes if she didn’t call. It seemed like a long time now. She could be fifteen or twenty miles away in forty-five minutes. What would she do if he appeared? She hadn’t really constructed much of a strategy except self-defence. Stussman suspected that the killer might be suicidal and she hoped she could play to that if they started a discussion – encourage him, even.

  ‘Good evening, Dr Stussman.’

  The voice came from directly in front of her. Out of the darkness. Heather Stussman jumped in terror and gripped the handle of the carving knife in her pocket. As she tried desperately to make out a face or a form, she half withdrew the knife in case he ran at her.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she said. It sounded pathetic, reedy and shrill in the vast openness of the cemetery.

  ‘I think you know,’ the voice said.

  ‘What should I call you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark. She thought she could make out a figure, straight ahead of her in the shadows. He was clever. He had chosen this spot carefully and deliberately. The same lights that illuminated her and the war memorial blinded Heather Stussman to the area beyond the pathway.

  ‘I am alone,’ she said.

  ‘So it seems,’ said Crowan Frayne. ‘Who did you tell? Not the police.’

  ‘I haven’t told anyone where I am. However, I have left a sealed envelope at Southwell College. It contains details of the arrangements for our meeting. It will be opened if I do not call in during the next half an hour.’

  ‘Very resourceful of you.’ Crowan Frayne stepped from the shadows onto the pathway. She could see him now: tall and lean, silhouetted. A hole in the night.

  ‘Where is Sergeant Dexter?’

  ‘Safe.’ He didn’t move.

  ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘You will.’

  Heather Stussman shivered. There was a terrible calm about the man.

  ‘I would like you to come with me.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘There is a grave plot some twenty metres from here. I would like you to see it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s important. Step out onto the pathway and walk. Please.’

  ‘You’re going to kill me.’

  ‘If you don’t do as I say, I surely will.’

  Stussman stepped away from the war memorial and onto the gravel pathway. The killer stood some two metres from her now. She could see his face more clearly: thin and gaunt, gouged with deep lines of sadness. His eyes appeared black – as if they weren’t there. He gestured to her to start walking. He stayed a couple of paces behind. Stussman kept her right hand in her pocket.

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Crowan Frayne from behind her. ‘A screwdriver or a Southwell College cheese knife?’

  She cursed quietly. She could hear him smiling. ‘It’s a carving knife and if you screw with me I will stick it into your dick.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. Turn left here.’

  They had arrived where two pathways crossed. Stussman did exactly as she was told. There was a cluster of small gravestones to her right. They had walked about ten yards when she heard Frayne step off the gravel. She stopped and looked around. He was standing looking down at a grave. So, Stussman thought, you have lost someone and now you want to join them. How could she use that to her advantage? She took a step towards him.

  ‘Someone who was close to you?’ she asked softly.

  ‘She is me. She penetrates my every thought and action, every molecule that holds me together. Just as a tree draws up the dead in its sap and its leaves, in the yellow and white of its flowers, so she is drawn up into me. See her blossoming beauty.’ He stretched his arms to the sky.

  ‘Who was she?’

  Crowan Frayne gestured to her to approach him. Stussman did so and turned to look at the inscription on the headstone. Frayne shone a torch on the stone. She read aloud, sotto voce:

  ‘Violet Frayne 1908–1999, beloved mother and grandmother. One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die.’

  Frayne stood absolutely still as Stussman read. She paused and turned to him. She was close now, dangerously close.

  ‘It’s from the “Holy Sonnets”. Death be not proud, for though some have called thee mighty and dreadful …’

  ‘Thou art not so,’ said Crowan Frayne.

  ‘Were you very close?’

  Frayne ignored her and raised his eyes to the sky. The stars blinked and sung back to him. He relaxed his grip on the torch and its light drifted over onto the next headstone. Stussman read it to herself. ‘Elizabeth Frayne, 1944–1967.’

  ‘Is this your mother?’

  ‘She facilitated me. She was fortunate to work such an alchemy.’ Frayne knelt at Violet’s grave and scooped up a handful of dirt. He stood and placed it in his mouth, turning to face Stussman. She took an instinctive step backwards. Soil fell from Crowan Frayne’s mouth as he chewed.

  ‘Aristotle believed that stones and plants, animals and men all had souls. Am I correct, Dr Stussman? I suck their souls from the earth. These flowers –’ he pulled up a clump from the ground ‘– are rich with my grandmother’s colour and spirit. Her intelligence gives their simple cell divisions and chemical reactions a breathtaking musicality.’

  Frayne tore off the leaves and petals and ate them vigorously. ‘A year ago today my grandmother died under the same sky, these same stars. Her spirit was engulfed by the soft cadences of the Harmoniae Mundorum – the same pitches and rhythms that we hear now, infusing this place.’ He raised his hands to the vast celestial orchestra, as if he was conducting their strange and terrible music: the music of time, separation and creation that had triangulated across the infinities and sharpened to a white-hot point in his brain. ‘And yet she remains incomplete, an abomination.’

  Stussman watched him, uncertain whether to run away as his attention plummeted through the dark pools of his imagination. But he would catch her, she knew. Besides, she was lost in an unfamiliar place. He turned back to her.

  ‘Life is an ugliness, Dr Stussman. My grandmother defined beauty and yet she was herself an exhibit of ugliness. I was born in ugliness; the ugliness of loss and ago
ny. My life has been an ugliness and yet I scale the heights of beauty and wit.’ He moved his hand in a sudden, flicking movement and hurled dirt and grit into Stussman’s face. She staggered back, her hands at her face, trying to push away the scratching, dirty pain in her eyes. ‘Do you feel the salty sting of my wit, Dr Stussman?’ he asked as he advanced on her. ‘Do you roast in the flames of unexpected genius? Do your eyes burn as if they had seen the very face of God?’

  Stussman fell backwards over a gravestone and in a second Crowan Frayne was on her. He put his foot against her throat and quickly took the knife from her pocket, flinging it into the anonymous distance. He hauled her, kicking and writhing, back to Violet Frayne’s grave and, rolling her over, pushed her face into the dirt. Stussman panicked as the pain seared at her eyes and she struggled for breath.

  ‘Take a long, deep, luxurious mouthful, Dr Stussman. Let the elemental dead crawl across your tongue and infuse your consciousness with music and colour.’ He pushed her harder into the soil. Mud forced its way into her mouth. She felt sick as it tickled her throat. ‘This is the taste of death, Dr Stussman. Relish it. There is transcendent beauty in its ugliness. The earth is enriched. I am every dead thing/In whom love wrought new Alchemie/For his art did expresse/A quintessence even from nothingness.’ Frayne pulled Stussman’s face from the mud. She was coughing and retching. ‘Tonight, Dr Stussman, we will complete my grandmother’s ascent back to beauty. We will become the burning soul of wit. Through the alchemy of our intelligence, the chanting voices of the dead that we draw together and amplify, we will forge angels in the oven and rise into infinity like smoke on the wind.’

  Crowan Frayne struck Heather Stussman on her right temple with the butt of his torch. Then he struck her again.

  68

  Harrison called Marty Farrell at six-fifteen that evening. He had just received a call himself from the Head Porter of Southwell College and had learned that Heather Stussman had met with the killer an hour previously. A squad car had been dispatched to the cemetery immediately and had found nothing.