Malcolm would. 'A pretty wife like you – he'd want to show you off,' he said, feeling better. Probing if she could be hurt, he went on, 'I was glad Malcolm stayed on. No sense in the night being spoiled for both of you. When he'd said to me you weren't coming, I told him, ‘Don't worry – you won't lack for company at my house’.'
'Do you make sure people have... company?'
'I'm a good host. I like to be sure everybody enjoys himself.' Faintly, he caught her perfume; she was close to him with her long neck and little breasts. He had a partiality for the kind of women he described to himself as lady-like, and a particular way of dealing with them in bed. 'God, I'd forgotten what it was like,' that corrupt bastard of a policeman Eddy Stewart had said to him the other day, 'to get a young one under you. It's a different thing altogether.' It had been good to hear that from a man half his age; he had never had to do without young flesh.
'I didn't know you'd left on Saturday,' he said. 'I was looking for you and they told me you'd gone. I'd have seen you home.'
'Why would you do that?'
'The good host...'
What had he expected on Saturday night? Malcolm Wilson was a familiar type; at first sight, the wife had been too. With that mass of black hair, better looking maybe than he'd expected – would have expected if he'd given it more than a casual thought – but not beautiful, not even really his type. He'd seen better; had better; no lack of them. She had argued with him, saying it was wrong for any man to be too rich. Even that, though, he had encountered before; some women took that line to catch your interest; it was, after all, only another kind of flattery. He had told John Merchant, 'this lady here's been talking politics at me. Trying to convert me.' Merchant, smooth as ever (and slippery, a shadow of worry), had said, 'That is a process of two steps, first you become as a little child and then Mrs Wilson has to find a way for you to pass through the eye of a needle.' And he had said ‘yes, I'm a kid at heart. And Irene and me are going to be such friends, I think she might provide the eye of a needle for me yet.' Not subtle, but with the wives of ambitious young men you didn't have to be. Only, she had gone early, disappeared, and he hadn't been able to get her out of his head since. She had a trick of looking at a man that excluded everyone else in the world.
'Oh, I'd have seen you home. Since your husband was busy. What was it you said a minute ago? ‘Rich one day, poor the next?’, your husband wants to get on in the world. He's ambitious. Wouldn't you like to see your husband making a bit of money?'
'Malcolm.'
'You don't have to remind me – I know his name.' He thought, She imagines I'm an old man who forgets names. 'Believe me, when I do business with a man, there isn't much I don't know about him. That's twenty-four hours a day I mean. Like you not wanting him to come today and see what we were doing at the Underpass.'
'Was that where he was today?'
She seemed so genuinely puzzled that, believing her, he felt offended. 'I'm surprised he didn't tell you. It's his future we're talking about here.'
But when she laughed again, even before she spoke, he understood that it was some kind of game she was playing with him. His anger, unexpectedly even his sense of foolishness, sharpened his lust.
'Of course, he told me,' she said. 'He was terribly pleased with himself. You know what he's like.'
'His brother phoned to say he wouldn't come. Malcolm tells me he didn't know anything about it. I wondered if he'd told his brother to do that, and then lost his nerve. Why would his brother phone off his own bat?'
'You can ask him yourself. He's coming here this afternoon.'
'Why?'
She shrugged. 'To see Malcolm, I was surprised. They don't go out of their way to see one another. They don't get on well. Maybe he wants to talk to Malcolm about this Underpass of yours.'
'Your husband wouldn't be stupid enough to listen to him. He has a future if he plays his cards right. You tell him that, keep him right, be a good wife to him.'
He put his hand on her leg and felt the warmth of her in his palm. She giggled; a surprising noise, very warm and amused.
'I had a bet with myself you'd do that about now,' she said and lifted his hand from her. Strangely, for a second as she held it, he seemed to see his own hand through her eyes: plump, very white, wrinkled on the wrist like a used glove. At the firmness of her touch, he felt a weakening pleasure and made no resistance, but his anger increased.
'Do you want all the nice things as much as he does? Christ, I recognised him as soon as I met him. Men like him – I've been buying them all my life.' It wasn't what he had meant to say. It was stupid to talk like this to her. He could not help himself. 'Buying them or frightening them. Sometimes they have to be frightened.' The tip of her tongue wiped her bottom lip and the corner of her mouth. Where it had passed, her lips shone. It was in his power to arrange for people to be hurt; even if he was old. It made no sense for him to be uncertain or to feel that he was not in control.
'You want all those nice things,' he said. 'I can tell. A pretty girl like you. You're ambitious. Just like him.'
He put his hand on her breast. When she did not flinch, he gradually tightened his grip, looking all the time into her face. With his other hand, he grasped her by the jaw and began to draw her towards his mouth. She sank her teeth into the web of wrinkled flesh that hung at the root of his thumb. It was no nip but a real bite that took meat out of his hand as he tore it away.
He heard a voice whimpering with shock.
'As if I cared about any of that,' he heard her say.
He was on his feet looking down at her and there was a noise. It took him a moment to understand that someone was knocking at the outer door.
'The bell's out of order,' she said. 'Malcolm keeps intending to have it fixed. If I hadn't been expecting you, you might still have been standing on the step trying to ring it.'
His uninjured hand made itself into a fist, and then it would only be a matter of moving it through the air. Her eyes shone as she looked up at him. The crazy idea came into his head that she wanted him to hit her. By the side of her mouth, there was a smear of bright blood. When his fist opened, his two hands shook.
'I could have you cut,' he said stupidly.
He had no help from his anger or his lust. That night both were with him as he imagined what he might have done to her and followed each refinement with another until he climaxed and slipped into a troubled sleep. But when it mattered, he let himself be led through the hall past the telephone and the tea roses. When the door opened, the man outside had reacted very fast, like a fighter, taking a half step back. Before he could stop him, the man had caught his uninjured hand, turning it so that he could look at the wound. 'It's all right, Murray,' the woman had said. 'He's just leaving.'
The sun struck signals off the windows of cars. His legs and belly ached. It was hard to walk. He felt a great temptation to rest on one of the stone steps that led up into the neat little gardens. When the Underpass is finished, he thought. I'll deal with her then – and him. Afterwards – when I don't need him; that made sense, it was smart; he had been smart. The pain of his hand cut through his confusion, making him feel sick. Where he had cradled it, the blood had spread across his shirt as if he had been wounded in the chest. He hid it in his pocket and with his good hand he drew the jacket across to hide the stain. He tried to think how long he had been in the house. Soon he would come on the parked car. Had he been long enough in the house? Would Denny think it had been long enough?
He was very tired and the sun beat on his unprotected head. He tried to understand why he had submitted to being led out of the house, but with each effort instead of an explanation he received an image of her mouth with the smear of blood as she said, 'As if I cared.'
It was not possible that what he had felt was fear. He dismissed the idea of fear, stumbling along in the heat, looking around for the car and, fierce veins beating in his skull, worrying about how he would explain himself to Denny his chauffeur.
/> 5 The First Victim
THURSDAY, AUGUST 30TH 1988
Then his name did not matter. He was fifty-one years old and in good shape apart from the regular discomfort produced by a stomach ulcer. He believed there was more risk in visiting doctors than in staying away from them. He could not forget how as a boy he had seen his mother come back from hospital unable to raise her head from her chest because treatment had destroyed the muscles of her neck. As a result he swallowed quantities of tablets and powders he got from the local chemist, and died without ever discovering the cause of his discomfort. There was no way of knowing how many of the lines round his eyes had been scored by the ulcer and how many by the process of his marriage going bad.
From ten days earlier, when his wife left him, he had been explaining to neighbours that she was gone to visit their married daughter in Shreveport, a city in Louisiana, which is one of the Southern states of the United States. As it happened, most of his neighbours knew where Louisiana was. He told the truth elaborately because he was a rather dull, meticulously honest man, and because he was missing out the one thing that mattered which was that she had explained to him with some force why she did not intend to come back.
On that Thursday morning, he had told his employer he was taking leave of absence. There had been some unpleasantness and he was not certain that his job would be there when he wanted it again. Previously he had taken the surrender value of his life assurance policies and in his pocket he had an airline ticket to the United States. He had been disappointed by the sum he had realised on the policies but it was enough, and fortunately he was in sound health, apart from the unsuspected ulcer and a long history of trouble with his teeth. Later, when his name mattered, the record of so much dental work was helpful.
Tomorrow he would catch a plane, tonight he could not face an
empty house. He ordered a beer and asked what was available to eat, settling for two rolls sad enough to have been left over from the lunch offering. Steadily he chewed on them as if he could masticate the years of his marriage, purge what had been wrong and take only the best of it with him across the Atlantic to his wife. It was a fool's sacrament, tasting of chemicals, to whiten, to aerate, and to speed fermentation. There was nothing in it of wheat. If it was a penance, he served it.
Perhaps he made a special kind of face reflecting on all of that for when he looked up the woman was already watching him.
He had been married to the same woman most of his adult life and been faithful. Even during the bad last years, he had not turned to another woman. The kind of life he lived did not throw him into the company of anyone likely, and he had lost the courage or the knack of hopefulness needed to offer himself to a stranger. It was more than three years since he had made love to his wife; although they continued all that time out of old habit to share a bed. His manhood was dry.
Yet when he saw the woman watching, he left his place at the bar and joined her. He gave himself no time to think, which was extraordinary, and as he listened to her a knot of fear and excitement tightened and unwound and tightened in him. It was as if even at his age a man might change and become somehow new.
'It would have been our thirtieth anniversary next month.'
Close up, she was younger than he had thought. He had made a judgement on the woman sitting alone watching him which did not fit the girl opposite. She was certainly under thirty with very blonde hair cut short and dark big eyes. She had a good jaw and clearly marked cheekbones, things which he associated with character. For some reason, it seemed to him like the face of a country girl – and then she looked to the side and down and it was a beautiful face.
'Would have been? Is your wife dead?'
At her tone, the faintest disturbance moved in him like the shadow of one of those fish which are misshapen by the pressure of living far under the surface. According to his ideas if you misunderstood and spoke to someone of a near relative who was dead as if the person still lived then you would offer, even perfunctorily, some convention of apology. There had been nothing of that. Her voice was pleasant and curious, but there was no place in it for remorse.
'Oh, no, not dead. She's gone to Shreveport... It's a town. In Louisiana. That's in the south – of the United States.'
She held out her glass and smiled.
When the drinks came, he waved away the change. The size of the tip he had given alarmed and pleased him. Out of character, anything was possible.
'Shreveport,' he explained, 'is more like a city really. It's quite interesting how it got its name. A riverboat captain cleared a logjam that had blocked the whole river. They named the place after him. His name was Shreeve, you see. That was in 1836.'
'You have a good memory for dates.'
It seemed to him that no one had ever listened to him as attentively as this stranger. She made him feel as if they were alone in the room.
'My daughter lives there and she wrote long letters telling us about the history of the place and what industries it has and about how funny it was at first to see the policemen going around with guns. She wanted us to share it all.'
'That sounds nice. Did she write you separate letters?'
'What?'
'I mean one to you and then one to your wife – or just all the time to both of you "Dear Mummy and Daddy".'
'All her letters were to both of us,' he said and felt tears press behind his eyes which made him angry until he remembered. She doesn't know Clare's left me.
'That doesn't seem fair.' He felt old, bitter and wise. As if any of it had to be fair.
'People are different,' she said. 'You can't make them one thing, it's dull. Not that it's exciting here. Would you like to come to my place? We could have a drink there just as well as here.' When he had been young, men wanted and girls refused. It had been a battle in which you led attacks and devised stratagems; getting your hand to the top of a leg had been a major victory and typically brought the campaign to an abrupt halt. He had claimed one complete success, and taken it for granted he should marry. Everyone had been younger then – himself, the girls – all of them younger than this woman beside whom he was an old man.
'You don't know me,' be began, 'and even nowadays –'
'My name is Frances,' she said. 'That better?'
He told her his name, and blundered on. 'Even nowadays – perhaps more than the old days – there's a risk involved for a girl. I mean with a stranger.' He was anxious to persuade her that she should not do this kind of thing again. 'Terrible things happen – you read of them in the papers. '
'You're nice,' she said. 'You're a very nice man. I wouldn't be taking any risk with you.'
They took a taxi, his car, since he did not believe in drinking and driving, was tucked safely out of sight in the garage at home. The elephant-grey legs of the flyover flicked past. 'They say,' she said, 'there's a woman buried in one of those. She was killed by a man and then her body was put in there. Next morning the workmen poured concrete on her. They didn't know she was there, you see.'
He was amused. 'I've heard that story before.'
'Do you think it's true? My - a friend told me that.'
'Heard it about somewhere else, I mean. I expect stories like that get made up about those things wherever they build them. It's because concrete is so ugly.'
She looked vaguely offended. 'No matter how much talk there was, there would be no way of finding out. The person would be buried until it didn't matter.'
'I think it would always matter,' he said, and then, afraid that would sound dull and moralising, hurried on, 'I don't think the police ever close the file on an unsolved murder’ What had first occurred to him, however, what he had meant, being serious minded and something of a moralist, was that time had nothing to do with it; it would never stop mattering that a soul had been deprived of life. 'Anyway, there couldn't be a body in all of them,' he explained reasonably. 'It's just like the old days in the country when every tree and hill had a story about a suicide – or a murder c
ome to that. Girls who killed their babies so no one would know. But you come from the country, don't you?' She had the rising inflections and, still, some of the vowels of one of the rural parts of the East Coast.
'From a fishing village,' she said.
'Plenty of superstitions there. It's not any different in the city. People think they're different, but human nature doesn't change.'
'You must have done a lot of travelling to find out so much.'
'No!' He felt that he had let down his guard and she might be laughing at him. 'It's just that I grew up in the country. I haven't travelled much. What chance have I had? I've been with the same firm for almost thirty years – twenty-eight years and, eh, five months to be exact.' She smiled and, realising, he wanted to say to her – you're right; what does it matter, five months, six months? He had always been exact. 'What chance have I had? Clerk, chief clerk. I couldn't have done so well if I'd moved. I began to take the exams – but I had to stop – I was warned about my eyesight. In the end, I was running the place.'
'You've done well,' she said. 'Now you own the business, isn't that right?'
'It's a family firm.' There had been a time when he thought he would get on the board of MacKinlays. 'The father still runs it – he's nearly eighty. I can still see him the way he was on the day he interviewed me for the job. Sometimes I think he's never changed. I changed – and the firm. It got bigger, and I helped.'
'I can see you'd be pleased,' she said, and yawned.
'He has two sons... never give your life to a family firm.'
Shamefully, tears prickled in the corners of his eyes. It had been a nasty little scene. 'I can't see what good it will do for you to run after her,' the old man had said angrily. 'It's such a bad time for you to go. I feel let down.' He was glad of the excuse, he thought suddenly; he wanted to get rid of me.
'His older son never liked me.' He stared blankly at the passing street. There was a corner shop, closed and shuttered; and a pub with narrow high-set windows like a fort. He realised they had left the main road behind. 'In that kind of work, the main thing is being able to cost a job properly. That's how you manage to make a profit. When he started, he couldn't do it, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn't get the hang of it. He made a botch of everything. It was me that tidied up after him. If you want a crime, that was my crime. It would have been better for the old man if I'd been his son.' Appalled, he fell silent. 'That was, oh, years ago.'
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