She showed me one of the special chisels, demonstrating how to use it on a piece of hard black timber; its blade was V-shaped in cross-section, specially made to slide through timber needing only minimal hand-pressure. Quite a lethal weapon, I thought, if it fell into the wrong hands.
After eating in the living room we relaxed on the sofa and she told me about her upbringing in the small Hertfordshire village, an only child with doting parents who’d died in a car crash when she was at university, studying Egyptology and archaeology.
“Ridiculous subjects to study,” she said, sipping red wine. “What’s the point of it? Mum and Dad dying like that, it brought it home to me how ephemeral life can be. I’d had all these fantasies about being an archaeologist and going on digs in ancient Egypt, writing papers, giving lectures. But after only a year into the course I realised that the reality was that the only options were teaching, which I didn’t want to do, or finding a post in some dreary museum, here or abroad. I wanted to do something practical. My father always liked tinkering with woodwork in his shed and I used to watch him. There’s something I love about timber, the smell and the feel of it. I decided to do a carpentry course. Then, after that, I taught myself about this kind of tiny micro-joinery.”
She showed me her books on ancient Greece, her pen-and-ink drawings of the ‘backs’, a waterside area of Cambridge, where there are quaint pubs by the river. I’m no judge but to me she seemed to be a talented artist. She loved music, playing me some of her favourites, Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen, even some early Bruce Springsteen, artists she deemed to be ‘timeless’, as well as modern musicians, most of whom I’d never heard of. The evening zipped past. I didn’t want it to end, I just longed for it to go on forever, because everything about her had hooked me. So when she told me that a close friend was seriously ill, and she’d promised the friend’s husband that she’d go up to York and look after her dolls’ house shop for her, I couldn’t hide my feelings.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
It was just after I’d kissed her for the first time. She was in my arms, and I was looking into her half-closed eyes. “I don’t want you to go. I want to see you tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that...”
“Jack, you don’t even know me–”
“I do. The moment I set eyes on you I knew you, something about your face was already there, in my mind. I’ve never felt like this before in my life. I knew your face before I even saw it, and I was obsessed with you from the moment I saw you.”
“I didn’t like you at first.” She pulled me closer, speaking in an urgent whisper. “Yet there was something that disturbed me about you. And I couldn’t forget you.”
“York isn’t that far. Can I come and see you?”
“Of course.” A tear appeared at the corner of her eye. “I want you to come and see me. I never dreamed this could happen. So fast. And I’m so sure about how I feel. It’s mad, crazy. Anyway, didn’t you say you’ve got to work on your book urgently?”
“Yes, that’s true, I have. I’d better leave you in peace. You’ve got to get up early.”
She looked into my eyes. “Believe me, I don’t normally do this. I swear that this isn’t like me. I usually get to know a guy for ages before...”
“What?” She felt warm in my arms, her body was soft and yielding, melting against mine. “What are you trying to say?”
“I don’t want you to go home tonight,” she whispered. “Stay with me?”
That night, the first time we were together, was the most amazing experience of my life. I remember waking in the early hours and her telling me more about her childhood, her parents, the village where she grew up. As I held her hand I noticed that the third finger of her left hand was slightly shorter than the rest, by about half-an-inch, and the nail was missing.
“It was an accident,” she told me, pulling her hand away.
“What happened?”
She closed her eyes, shook her head as if she was trying to suppress the memory. “I was with my father in his workshop – he had a workroom with woodwork machinery in the cellar of our house. Daddy was always making things out of wood, that’s what gave me the idea to do the same thing. He made me a dolls’ house, and all the furniture to go inside...” She looked up at me, smiling at the memory. “How I loved to watch him. I’d go down to watch him for hours, cutting all the timber and drilling and sanding. One day I was on my own down there. I’d seen him switch on the circular saw so many times that it was almost like second nature to me. I copied what he did. My finger was too close.”
I recoiled at the mental picture, trying to blank out the scene.
“There was hardly any pain at first. All I can remember now is the blood and the panic and my mum screaming and poor Dad crying – I’d never seen him cry before. Then the frantic car journey to hospital. All I lost was the top bit. It healed up fairly quickly.”
“You were lucky.”
“I was stupid. Nowadays I keep my hands well away from the blade. But it’s not machinery that scares me now, it’s people. The idea of being attacked. You must think I’m ridiculous, Jack. Scared of my own shadow.”
“You’re just sensitive. More aware of the dangers that everyone’s afraid of, that’s all. Maybe you’re more realistic than most.”
She nodded. “Do you know, Jack, I have this awful premonition. The feeling that I’m going to be killed.”
“What?”
I felt a cold shiver run along my spine.
“It’s stupid. There’s no logic to it. But that’s why I’m paranoid about my personal safety I suppose. I have this terrible feeling that I’m going to be murdered one day. I suppose that’s why this business in town is upsetting me so much.”
There was nothing I could say.
I noticed the first whisper of dawn through a crack between the curtains. A single bird began singing. Lucy’s voice went on, quiet, reasonable, as eerily dreadful as the sound of weeping. “I’ll be thirty eight very soon. And ever since I was young I had this feeling about the number thirty eight – a horrid sort of obsession, I suppose. I have this awful foreknowledge that I’m not going to live to see that day.”
I gulped. “It’s rubbish.”
“Maybe. I try and be rational about it, but there’s nothing I can do. I feel as if I’m kind of marked out or something. As if there’s nothing I can do to stop the inevitable.”
“It won’t happen,” I choked out. “I won’t let it happen!”
She smiled and shrugged. “Forget about it. I do whenever I can. As you say, it’s stupid and irrational and when I’m forty I’ll look back and laugh. Forget I said anything.” She stopped talking, staring out at the strip of window, and I noticed that the chink of sky had a streak of pink across it. “What are you afraid of, Jack?” she broke the silence at last.
“Dying alone.”
“Really?”
“Ever since Van Meer – I told you, the man who held me hostage. For most of those three days I was certain I was going to die. Everyone says that in a situation like that you just accept the inevitable. Maybe that does happen in, perhaps, a natural disaster, just before the end. Say if you’re in a plane that’s going to crash. But it wasn’t like that for me. Every time he put the gun in my mouth I thought that was it, and every time the fear was just as fresh as it had been the times before. And Van Meer knew that. He was enjoying it.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died. He came after me, nearly killed me for a second time,” I stopped talking, hating to dredge up the awful memories. “But someone saved my life.”
“Who?”
“It’s a long story.” I thought of the catalogue of trouble I’d only just managed to survive. “I’ll tell you one day. The point is before meeting Edward Van Meer I never believed that there was such a thing as pure evil.”
“Could you ever forgive him? Say if you knew it wasn’t his fault – that some kind of mental illness made him do it?”
/>
“I don’t know. Maybe if I was a better person I could.” I paused to think. “But no. I don’t think I could.”
“So do you believe in forgiveness?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“Do you really believe in, I don’t know, some kind of ultimate forgiveness? I mean like God’s forgiveness, that sort of ultimate redemption? I don’t mean for something ordinary. I mean forgiveness for doing something awful, something more awful and horrid than you can possibly imagine. I’d like to believe what the Bible says, that whatever terrible things you’ve done, as long as you’re truly, truly sorry, then He can forgive you, even if no one else ever can.”
I nodded. What she’d said was depressing me more than I could say. And I was so tired that sleep was threatening to drag me down.
“So do you?” she repeated, turning towards me, eyes wide and imploring.
“What?”
“Do you believe in forgiveness, for absolutely anything? I mean, supposing, hypothetically, you found out I’d done something really bad, do you think you could ever forgive me for it?”
“Of course I could.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” I grinned, trying to puncture the tension. “What have you done then? Not declared all your earnings to the Inland Revenue?”
She didn’t answer, just closed her eyes and fell asleep. I lay there listening to her breathing.
I’d heard about the instant kind of love, the look-across-a-crowded-room variety, but I’d never believed in it before. The peculiar feeling I’d experienced when I first met Lucy, the absolute certainty that I already knew her somehow, seemed like a kind of omen, as if it was a foreshadow, fate that we would meet, and be together. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s how it seemed at the time. I looked at her face and I saw everything I could ever want in my life. Which made no sense at all. Judging her dispassionately she was no great beauty, she wasn’t even particularly attractive, but somehow, to me, she was both of those things and many more besides.
And yet I had this underlying feeling that something wasn’t right. A niggling fear that I tried to repress.
One thing I recollect about that night was a tiny memory that I’d normally not have thought about, in fact I only remembered it much later. As I fell asleep beside her after that first dawn together, my arm around her waist, watching her chest rise and fall, listening to the slight rasp of her breathing and studying the faint white down on the side of her cheek, just below the hairline, I wondered if it could be real, if all this was actually happening to me, or if it was a dream. Next time I opened my eyes bright daylight was filtering through the crack in the curtains, illuminating the top of her dressing table: several glass bottles, a small mirror, and various cosmetics. Standing a little apart from the rest was a perfume bottle, labelled Heaven’s Dust.
The same extremely rare brand of perfume that Caroline Lawrence was certain she’d inhaled on the night she’d nearly died.
* * * *
Lucy left for York the following morning, and on Wednesday evening, after a gruelling day when I’d been talking to the parents of Bible Killer victim Angela McCree about their daughter, a strange thing had happened, and oddly enough it upset me far more than it should have done. Douglas Hosegood’s 1983 book Shocking Killers, that I’d shown to Lucy a few days previously, had disappeared. I wanted to refer to it because there were some sections in it that I often found useful to refer to whenever I was planning out a new book.
It was crazy. Ridiculous. I’d had it in my hands just a few days ago, it had never left my home, yet now it was nowhere to be found. I phoned Lucy and she was relaxed about it all, saying that it would turn up somewhere. But where could it have gone? Douglas had given it to me, and signed the copy, and it meant the world to me. How on earth could it have just vanished into thin air? Even though getting another copy wasn’t the same as having the one that Douglas had signed it was better than nothing, so I opened up my internet connection on the laptop and looked on Amazon to see if I could get another one, but it had long gone out of print, and nothing was available. That’s when I had the idea of mentioning it to Archie, Lucy’s downstairs neighbour and owner of Mad about the Book. “No problem Jack,” Archie assured me the following morning. “Leave it with me. With all my contacts in the trade I’m sure I can lay my hands on a copy.”
* * * *
I returned to my cottage after driving back from York – my first visit to Lucy. As I drove through the woodland road to my house, I reflected that it hadn’t altogether been a success. For the first time I began to have doubts that we could have a successful relationship. Lucy was somehow all or nothing: either full-on charm, or so quiet she almost seemed depressed. Her mood swings weren’t easy to get used to; perhaps because I’m pretty easygoing myself, I stay pretty much on an even keel, and trying to understand people’s moods and making allowances for them was new to me. We argued from time to time, and she became fiercely angry, saying vicious cutting remarks rather than screaming her head off. And those cruel remarks were far more hurtful than any off-the-cuff insult. For instance we both loved architecture: I was keen on buildings from a practical, builder’s, point of view, since I’ve learnt brickwork, plastering, plumbing and other building trades, whereas Lucy’s interest was in the finer, more cerebral, aspects of design. When I mentioned that I loved Rennie Mackintosh’s work, she announced without thinking, that Mackintosh produced rubbish for the masses, and went on to vilify the Scottish furniture designer whom I’ve always admired. It wasn’t the things she said, so much as the way she said them, as if to deliberately wound, to hurt.
But I was in the early stages of falling in love, ready to forgive her faults, and try and make things work between us. Staying for a couple of nights in her cramped flat above the little dolls’ house shop didn’t help. There was simply not enough room for two people, and I found her obsessive tidiness irritating, as if she couldn’t bear to leave anything out on a surface, it always had to be tidied away. I just couldn’t spread out and relax. The shop seemed oddly fussy, a weird emporium of crazy pretend houses, everything in miniature, everything in obsessively neat order, making me feel as if I was a clumsy giant in some bizarre Lilliputian world of make-believe, where the tiny dolls and their dinky houses were real and I was the outsider. I saw Lucy gazing at the minuscule features in the rooms, her mind totally locked into the astonishing pretend world, as if she was in a trance, shutting me out of her thoughts as surely as if she was in another room.
Dolls’ house enthusiasts seemed weird and slightly sick people to me. The tiny dolls were specially made to scale, to match the different sizes of the houses, the ones for the American market normally different dimensions to those for Europe. Lucy would pick them up and place them in position. A bowler-hatted father with a moustache, a blond haired Barbie lookalike, even tiny doll children. I found everything about the shop claustrophobic, even the customers seemed odd, fussy, strange-looking women mostly, whose eyes lit up as they wallowed in the miniature things, crouching down or kneeling to get up close, as if they longed to shrink down and join the dolls. There was one German woman with a hair lip and a rasping voice, who caressed the dolls as if they were her babies. She made my flesh creep.
On the following morning, Monday, I realised that making some attempt to contact the police investigation team in the Incident Room at Cowley Road station, was something I’d been putting off ever since my talk with Ann, my editor at Truecrime, but now I realised I couldn’t put it off any longer. Obviously no one was going to let me into the actual room or see any of the evidence, but I had a few friends amongst the Canterbury police, and, with any luck if I hung around outside the station I might catch sight of someone I knew, and I could ask a few subtle questions.
The police station was of tired red bricks, a ‘30s building on the outskirts of town. It was one of those ‘arsehole’ stations (police slang) for a place where nobody wants to work. Cowley Road station was sandwich
ed between two big council housing estates where the most usual crimes were drug related, and domestic violence was a routine event.
But I discovered that the Incident Room wasn’t in the station building at all, but in a large mobile caravan in the car park belonging to the Cowley Industrial Estate, across the road. The part of the car park where the large caravan was parked was in the far corner, clear of other vehicles, and an empty crisp packet and a page from a newspaper were wafted along by the breeze as I waited around and wondered what to do.
Then I had my first bit of luck of the day. Dave Parsons, a PC I’d been friendly with some years ago, came out of the caravan and hailed me.
“Hello Jack, what are you doing here?”
“Hoping for a bit of news. I’m writing a book about the Bible Killer, and I want to get something hot from your team.”
“You cheeky fucker!”
“I love you too, Dave!”
“You got some balls, I give you that. You know DCI Fulford’s leading the investigation?”
“Is he?” I pictured the Scottish character who’d interviewed me after I’d run down Caroline Lawrence. “I met him the other day.”
“Then you know what a bastard he is.”
“Who else is on your team?”
“The BIA is Millie Vee – ever come across her?”
“I worked with her a while ago.” I groaned inwardly.
“Fulford’s wetting himself with excitement to have got Millie. She’s on loan from the hospital psychiatric wing, s’posed to be highly academic, wrote a brilliant paper for her doctorate. Her boss is that psychiatrist who’s often on TV, Roger Lamelle, written loads of books, always being interviewed. Fulford reckons our Millie is the dog’s bollocks, she’ll crack the whole thing for us.”
“Umph.” I glowered.
“I take it you’re not a fan of Millicent Veitch?”
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