'Does Malcolm know she was your sister?'
'He didn't go there for my sake,' she said.
'I know what he went there for.' Saying that, he heard himself, harsh, dry, a voice full of a dry rage. He saw the heaviness of a man pressed down like a burden on the outspread body of a woman. It came between him and Irene so that he looked away from her as if she might read the unwanted vision in his eyes. 'Did I ever tell you,' she asked, 'that Frances expected to be fucked by you that day you went to her flat? While you were asking your questions, she kept waiting for you to start hitting her. After that, she expected to get fucked. She couldn't have stopped you. Instead you poured her stuff on to the floor.'
She got up and walked through into the kitchen. He followed and stood just inside the door watching her. She set down a bowl half full of a grey greasy mix beside the carcass of a chicken on a tray and began to lay beside it knives from a drawer, each coming down with its sharp separate knock on the wooden surface.
'It's not for me,' she said. 'I don't like chicken. It makes me squeamish.'
Tiredness gathered to a single ache at the base of his skull. The surface of the mix in the bowl was covered in flecks of green. Staring at it, he felt a drop of sour vomit rise into the back of his mouth.
'Finding out things is my business,' he said. 'I know who killed Annette Verhaeren. It's not a great secret – only his name doesn't appear in the papers.' But that wasn't what he wanted to say first. He had come to tell her about being in the village. 'Finding things out... I had a contact who helped me to trace where Annette's children had been taken for adoption.'
'Billy Shanks?'
She was working with a knife on the chicken carcass. She reached in with the blade first at one side and then the other, sawing to cut. With the knife she held back the skin at the top of the aperture and used her fingers to wrench the bone inside to and fro. The grey skin wrinkled back in folds under the pressure of the knife and the forked bone tore free at last crusted with brown meat stained with blood.
'Do you have to do that just now?'
'I read up,' she said, 'so I do things properly. I'm taking the bone out before I cook it and that makes it easier to carve.'
'Miss Sturrock said you were clever.'
'... Miss Sturrock.'
'She was the teacher in the village school. Maybe you don't remember her. But she remembers.'
'What would she remember from all that time ago?'
'An awkward girl who bumped into other children and spat when she talked.'
'Frances is dead. It's not kind to talk about her that way.'
'Not Frances – she was talking about you.'
'No,' Irene said. 'Not me. That was Frances.'
'Do you remember the cliffs above the village? Miss Sturrock took me up there. Do you remember how high above the sea it is? And then we went down to the loch. That's the only place where there are trees.' But the face she turned to him told him nothing; a pretty woman looking round from a kitchen task; he wanted to take her flesh between his fingers and mould some expression he could understand. 'What about the house then? Don't tell me you forgot the place you lived in. Miss Sturrock told me where to find it. I've never seen a lonelier place. You couldn't have been any lonelier on an island in the middle of the sea.'
A barbed-wire fence jumped, he crawled across a child's landscape patted out of plasticine, a heathland that sagged and rose in soft swellings as if the earth had bruised. He recognised everything, it was all the places he had lived as a child, scoured places, where even the flowers crouched under the wind. In a place like this his father had died, swum down the gull-crying air.
'It's not something I ever think about,' she said.
It was incomprehensible to him; even while they were talking she had her back to him, working at what was in front of her on the kitchen surface as if it was all that concerned her. She was taking the last soft portion of forcemeat and pressing it into the bird. Finished, she folded across the flap of the neck skin.
'When they were adopted, they weren't allowed to keep their own names,' he said harshly. 'The village liked familiar names. Like Frances. Or Alice.'
'The girl who went through the looking glass.'
The silence lay between them.
Swum down, fallen or jumped from a high place. He had left home and that had happened to his father. What would her reaction be if he said to her, none of the things she might expect, but, I have never known if my father killed himself or if it was an accident. What he remembered were their quarrels. That he might have been loved so much was not a possibility he had ever been able to bear.
She had turned and he saw that she was staring at his hands. He had clenched his fists.
'When you're there during those long waits in the hospital with your brother, does he tell you what Frances was like in bed? Do you like to listen to that, Murray?'
'Someone like you doesn't have to talk like this.'
Unexpectedly, she laughed. The noise grated on him like the squeal of a cat. 'I don't understand you,' she said. 'I haven't understood anything about you from the day I met you. What kind of detective are you? What do you do if a witness says "fuck"? What about "fuck"? How do you feel about "fuck", Murray?'
'I do my job.'
'Do you put your hands over your ears?' She dosed her ears with the tip of each forefinger, very gently in mockery.
Baited, he swung his head from side to side. 'I can do my job.'
'But you're no good at it. If you were any good at it, Frances would still be alive –'
'I can do my job,' he said again, clinging to that. 'Half the cops in the city are –'
'I'm talking about you.' She reached out and struck him softly on the chest. 'If you were any good, you would have known by this time who killed Merchant and the others.'
'Maybe I didn't want to know.'
He shouted into her face, all the pain and weariness forcing it out of him. And then in the silence, he listened to what he had said.
She sighed. 'It was that,' she rested her hand lightly on the big muscle of his arm, 'and the broken nose that fooled me. I've solved you, Murray. Inside you're a mummy's boy –'
She ended on a gasp as he lunged forward and pulled her against him. He crushed his mouth down on hers.
When he raised his head, she said with what might have been triumph or contempt, 'You needed that.'
He felt her body against his, not as a woman's – compounded of hardness, softness, swellings and incurvings – nor even as a body at all, but as a pressure that conveyed the beat of his own heart and resonated that beating until he shook to its drum of lust and rage.
'No,' he said, 'I needed this,' and moved too quickly for her to stop him.
'Poor Malcolm,' she said.
They were back in the living room. Everything was the way it had been before. Except that he wanted to say to her, that wasn't me. I'm not like that. He wanted to go over to the couch and sit beside her and draw her head down on to his shoulder. The trite sentimental image of togetherness presented itself to him, vividly, painfully, lingeringly. When, ashamed, he bundled it away, its trace was left behind like the rings of fading light from a lamp when the eyes close.
'He was so anxious to be a success,' she said. Listening to her voice, he edged the curtain aside. The window was splashed with fat drops of rain; he watched it fall slanting under the street light. 'Did you know how ambitious he was? He called that man Bradley 'the boss' - and he was desperate to get his job. But they were going to put Bradley in prison, except that he cheated them by getting cancer and dying first. They were ready to arrest him. Poor Malcolm didn't know that.
'How do you know what was going to happen to Bradley?'
'Peerse – that policeman who came to Mum Wilson's – the one who told us to go home and he would find them – he's been here twice. He's angry because he was sure Frances was Jill - and she spoiled everything by getting herself killed. Now he doesn't know what to think. He explained
all that to me – he likes to explain things.'
With a shrill gust, the wind burst rain like shrapnel across the glass. In the house opposite they had drawn the curtains at last. Everyone had something to hide.
'He told me how Jack the Ripper killed a Woman called Mary Kelly on the 9th of November. Peerse is waiting for the 9th of November because he thinks Jill will kill someone else then. Mary Kelly was a prostitute, just like the others, and he killed her in her room and cut her to pieces. Because it was in a room and not in the street, he had more time. The room was like a butcher's shop with her blood. He even hung bits of her flesh from the nails in a picture frame.'
He heard her get up and turned to follow her out of the room, but stopped after a few steps as if he had come up against an invisible wall. He had to force himself to enter the kitchen for the second time.
'Watch your feet,' she said. 'There's broken glass on the floor.
That could be dangerous.'
Not stepping among it, she stretched out to reach the tray with the chicken. 'Open the oven door.'
'Peerse didn't have any right to come here,' he said. 'Not unless it's official – and I don't think it was. You don't have to listen to him.'
She slid the tray into the oven and closed the door. 'I didn't know I had any choice. He says that after Jack the Ripper killed Mary Kelly the murders stopped. They waited for another one to happen, but it didn't. And Jack the Ripper wasn't ever caught. They still don't know who he was. Peerse said there were all kinds of theories – that it was a surgeon or a lawyer called Montague John or a duke – one of the royal family. All kinds of theories. Even one that it might be a woman. But there weren't any more murders. Maybe the person who'd done them went abroad. Or died. Committed suicide. But not ever caught. Peerse is waiting for the 9th of November –'
'Only he won't rest unless he catches somebody.' On impulse, he added, 'He won't have to wait till November. Don't ask me why, but I feel that. It'll end before then.'
'That means someone will have to be killed sooner.' She said it as simply as a child. 'Your friend Peerse says there has to be another one. And no one will be caught, but afterwards whoever did it will stop. That'll be the end of it.'
'No, that kind of murderer is like an animal that's tasted blood. Maybe not here anymore, maybe another city, maybe even another country – it wouldn't stop. The temptation would be too strong.'
'That's not true,' she cried. 'She could go away and start a new life. She would just disappear. She wouldn't do it again, and that would be the end of it.'
'That doesn't sound to me like Peerse.'
She stared and then said, 'Oh, yes, he told me that – something like that. I'm sure he did. You said yourself there are murderers who aren't ever arrested – like the man who killed that woman you talked about.'
'Annette Verhaeren.'
'Yes.' She knelt and began to brush the fragments of glass into a dustpan. As she picked up one of the larger pieces to drop it into the pan, he saw that it had opened a thin cut along one of her fingers. Without looking up she said, 'I know about him – he works for Blair Heathers. One night in bed, Malcolm was crying. Kujavia had taken him to that flat – the one the fat woman was in. Malcolm wanted to see the black girl who'd been at Heathers' party. Only when he told me what Kujavia had done to her, he started to cry. But not even that could make him stop wanting to have Bradley's job for himself.'
'He's not ambitious now,' Murray said. If it was a defence of his brother, it was a brutal one. 'He told you – and you told Frances. That was a bit of luck she had; it's not easy to find someone. Not when you come back to a city as a stranger after such a long time.
But when she went to Mary O'Bannion's, Kujavia wasn't there. Sometimes he sleeps there, but he uses other places as well. He has to be careful. Billy Shanks told me once – if that bastard got himself killed, half of Moirhill would come out into the streets and dance.'
She swung open the mouth of the bin. Glass glittered, turning as it fell. She licked the blood from her finger.
'What makes you think Frances wanted to find him?'
'Because she knew he had killed her mother. Because,' he hesitated, 'it's possible she had nightmares about him.' Tufts of black hair in a carnival crown of spikes. 'Maybe she saw her mother being killed – the way she was killed. She had to do something about him.'
'Poor Frances.'
He nodded, watching her.
'She's dead,' Irene said. 'There isn't anything she can do now.'
'He is a dangerous man. There wouldn't have been anything she could do. She was lucky she didn't find him.'
'Even although he knew she was looking?'
'Did he?'
'That's what you told me.'
Murray remembered. 'Going to Mary O'Bannion's,' he said slowly, 'that was probably a mistake. She shouldn't have gone there.'
Somewhere he heard a sound of music, a radio being played too loudly, as if a door had just been opened. He was so concentrated upon her, however, that for the moment it did not register.
Inconsequentially, she said, 'Tomorrow I'm going to Blair Heathers. He phoned and asked me.'
'Why would you go to Heathers?' He stared at her in bewilderment. Always she surprised him, left him shut out, excluded. 'There isn't anything for you there.'
'I can't go to Mary O'Bannion's,' she said. 'I'm not as brave as Frances.'
But as he tried to understand, she turned away.
I'm here bitch I'm here bitch I'm here I'm here I'm here.
Before he could speak, she said, 'Mum Wilson must be coming down.'
'What?'
'I'll take her to the hospital tomorrow – on my way to Heathers.'
'Mother? She's been upstairs all this time?'
The music stopped as if a switch had been turned. Straining, he heard a door bang shut. She was coming down.
'Didn't you realise? I couldn't leave her on her own. That wouldn't have been right. Tomorrow I'll feed her chicken before we go.' Irene smiled. 'She had to rest. I thought you knew...'
When he let her go, she said, in what he heard as contempt, 'You needed that.'
He felt her body against his and shook with lust and rage. 'No,' he said. 'I needed this.'
He was too quick for her. With a boxer's reflex, he swept away her hand as it hooked for his face and with his weight crowded her back the length of the kitchen until the wall stopped her. She had nowhere to go. She was in jeans without a belt so that, when he popped the button and pulled, the zip peeled down to the crotch. She didn't speak but grunted with the effort of striking at him. Her hand swung round his back; some corner of his mind recorded that she was using only one hand; her left hand hit him again and again just over the kidneys. 'Get them off.' And he used both hands to drag pants and jeans down her thighs. 'Ah, yes.' 'You,' she heaved against him, 'prove – nothing – prove nothing you bastard – bastard – ' And with that he turned her and laid her belly down across the work surface. Her body made its own space, smashing neatness into debris, sending aside a glass that rolled until it fell and exploded on the floor by their feet. With his hands he held her legs open and by some accident of dexterity put himself into her without any fumble or searching; a terrible shameful relief unblocked his loins, for his rage had been shot through with fear that he would fail to enter her, go soft. Instead, with that hard muscle filling her, he began to beat up, bending his knees and driving up so that he lifted her from the floor with every stroke, and it was not her, not her body, it was his heart he drove against, beat against, that drum stick beaten by lust and rage, whose pace raced against him until one or the other had to surrender and he, for survival, released all his need and suffering in a shuddering discharge that seemed as if it would never let him end. When it slowed he was still full of tension and kept her split on that thick rod from which he dangled her. He had her left hand in his and drew it up high between her shoulders bunching up the bright shirt so that he looked down the stretch of her naked back from t
heir intertwined fists to where the hair of his groin foamed black against the white globes of her buttocks. With his other hand, he gripped her by the nape of the neck and now turned her head so that her cheek lay against the board and she sought him with her eye. 'Do you know what's happened to you? What I've done to you?' he asked and tightened his grasp. She said something but he was too excited to listen. 'You've been fucked. Your word, not mine. Fucked.'
'You may as well stop,' she gasped; this time he heard. 'There's no one there.'
Unstrung then, he bent forward and laid himself gently down until he rested on her. A great sweat burst out of him, issuing from his long need and loneliness, oiling the junction of their bodies and thighs. Her hair surrounded his face and he drew a strand between his lips and blew it away softly; and saw her hand clenched by him on the board. Because it was so close, the hand was out of proportion, grotesquely large, little hills of knuckles, and the knife it held glinted like a rapier. In reality only a kitchen knife with a blade five or six inches long, but honed on either side and drawn to a point. A blade for sticking or slicing, he remembered her hand punching into his back; her left hand; the knife was in her right.
He straightened and eased out of her. With a little grunt of complaint, she pushed herself upright. She faced him, not trying to cover herself or put on the jeans and pants tangled round one ankle.
'I'm sorry.'
'I don't ever have an orgasm. If that's important.' Her hands hung empty by her sides.
'I'm sorry.'
'You want me to cover myself?'
She bent and took up her pants, settling herself into them comfortably and smoothing the shirt down over her flanks. She pulled up the jeans and fastened the button, then fished out the toggle to draw up the zip moving her hips up and forward with an intimate movement as if she was alone.
'If you had hit me with the knife,' he said hoarsely, 'I would be dead by now.'
It lay where she had discarded it beside the bowl and the broken scatter of stuff on the surface, and she reached out and swung its shining blade away from them.
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