And here the precious dust is layd;
Whose purely temper’d Clay was made
So fine, that it the guest betray’d.
Elegy on Maria Wentworth
Thomas Carew (1594–1640)
THEY HAD SHAVED her scalp. All that beautiful red hair was gone. Alette’s face seemed mottled and bruised in the cool, green dusk of the hospital room.
Four o’clock in the morning. The time when death’s angel is walking, as his mother would say.
‘Mmmgh.’
The sound was tiny—a soft rattle of phlegm in her throat. He leaned over until his face almost touched hers. He gently placed his finger in the soft hollow beneath her eye.
She would be dead soon. ‘Worm’s meat,’ as the good Dr Donne wrote so elegantly. But no, she would be cremated… she had stipulated it so in her will. No maggots and slow decay for his red-haired love. Fire and cleansing and brittle ashes. ‘Precious dust,’ said Thomas Carew. Another seventeenth-century poet with an ear for a clever conceit.
He sniffed gently at the scent of her skin. His lips barely touched the lovely high ridge of her cheekbone.
He pulled back. Alette was jerking her head and rolling it slightly from side to side on the pillow. Her eyeballs moved underneath the curved, veined lids.
He wondered if she sensed that she was in danger. Maybe fear was able to breach even the soft, implacable hold of the coma that was shuttering her brain. She had been conscious of danger yesterday just before she drove back to London; of that he was certain. He had watched as she lingered for a moment beside the open car door, slapping her gloves against the palm of her hand: back and forth, back and forth. She had hesitated, he knew, because she sensed a rage in the air.
He always marvelled at her psychic abilities. Although she sometimes prostituted herself doing readings for stupid, bored, rich women just like any other common fortune-teller—pandering to their wishes, telling them what they wanted to hear—she was the real thing. She had the gift. He was awed by it and enchanted. Catching a glimpse of this gift was like catching sight of a furtive flame through the closed fingers of a cupped hand.
Back and forth went her gloves. Back and forth. He watched her. He held his breath and his mind silently screamed at her to get into the car.
Get into the car.
To reach this point had taken months. He had engaged in extensive research on how to sabotage the car. Detective novels aside, it’s a tricky business: tampering with brakes. It’s not easy to get it just right. To inflict just enough damage so that the brakes would keep functioning normally and only give way once she steered the car through those hairpin bends down the cliff. Of course, he had also ensured that her seat belt wasn’t working.
Get into the car.
With a slight shrug of her shoulders she turned her body sideways, pulling both her legs into the car with one feminine, graceful motion; her skirt riding up slightly against her thigh.
What was it Alette had said during their last conversation? ‘My life is obsession. At times I’m obsessed with keeping my own freedom. At other times I’m obsessed with robbing someone else of theirs.’
She had spoken slowly, sounding almost puzzled. The light streaming in through the window had blanked out the expression in her eyes. Her face had the flawless, un-human look of a face caught in the cold shock of a flashlight.
Obsession.
Obsession is an open wound; a trickle of rotting pus. Only a clean cut can stop the green poison from spreading. Amputation. Severance. Brutal, uncompromising and quick. Soft hands make stinking wounds, as his mother was fond of saying, and she was right. A break has to be clean and absolute. Final.
With no possibility of a comeback.