February 1945
Tottenham, London
Rose had laid on an impressive spread, considering the meagre resources. Violet Frayne crunched her third cucumber sandwich of the morning and washed it down with a gulp of sugary tea. It was a comfortable room. Neatly presented, without the clutter of ornaments that Violet always found so distasteful in the homes of others. Rose had bought a couple of prints since Violet’s last visit: both were of composers, Mozart and Bach. They had been strategically placed above the piano. Perhaps Rose found inspiration in their black-eyed gaze.
Elizabeth had finally fallen asleep in her crib after squawking and yowling for over an hour. Violet found her baby exhausting sometimes and was grateful when her sister had the idea of placing a drop of brandy in the baby’s milk. It had worked like a dream and Violet made a mental note to intoxicate Elizabeth whenever she played up in future.
Violet scanned Rose’s book collection. It covered an entire wall and contained many first editions and beautifully bound collections of poetry and drama. Her own collection back in Bolden seemed rather threadbare in comparison. She chanced upon a copy of Macbeth, superbly presented in black leather binding and delicate gold-leaf lettering. It was her favourite play. She returned to her chair and began, with considerable care, to turn the pages. She jumped slightly as Rose returned to the room bearing a freshly baked Dundee cake.
‘There we are, Violet, I know it’s your favourite.’ Rose placed the cake on the small table in front of her sister and cut off two generous slices.
‘You shouldn’t have, Rose.’ Violet felt guilty. ‘You must have wasted a week’s rations on me.’
‘Nonsense. I always have more than I need. And I’ve no one else to cook for.’ Rose winced as the words came out. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Vi, I wasn’t thinking.’
‘It’s been nearly a year now,’ Violet said. They left it at that.
‘I see my little trick worked on Madam,’ said Rose, looking over at the sleeping baby.
‘She’s dead to the world.’
‘Oh! You found one of my Burlington Shakespeares.’ Rose nodded at the book in Violet’s hand.
‘It’s beautiful, Rose. Wherever did you get them all?’
‘There’s a shop, Forbes Books, in Charing Cross Road. They have a wonderful selection. Very reasonable, too.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘They bought all the stock of Burlington Publishing when the company went broke a year or two ago. You can pick up some real bargains. Nobody wants quality books any more. I think they make the room.’
‘They do, Rose. I’m frightfully jealous.’
‘Why don’t you pop in there before you head home? You can pick up a bus on Seven Sisters Road. It would only take half an hour.’
‘I might do that.’ Violet turned back to the book. ‘Hamlet is masterly but I think I prefer Macbeth to all the other tragedies. The language is so compelling.’ She read aloud from the text:
‘Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!”
Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care …’
Rose finished the quotation from memory:
‘The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s balm
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course.’
Violet closed the book softly and smiled at her sister. ‘Only two schoolteachers would meet for lunch and end up quoting Shakespeare at each other.’
‘At least we put the emphasis in the right places.’
‘You have to know your iambs from your trochees!’
Rose laughed. ‘“Iambic pentameter is the building block of modern culture.” Sound familiar?’
‘Father.’ Violet smiled too. ‘I always thought that his monologues on classical literature were his revenge on us for being girls.’
‘You may well be right.’ Rose paused for a moment. ‘Are you all right, Vi? I hope you don’t mind me asking but sometimes I can’t sleep for worrying about you and the baby.’
‘We’re fine.’ Violet’s eyes misted slightly but she wouldn’t cry, she would be strong. As she had always been. ‘We have the house and money’s not really a problem.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I know what you meant.’
‘Losing someone like that. It must be a terrible thing.’
Violet swallowed hard. The tears were brimming up inside her. She fought them all back except one. She looked her sister directly in the eye.
‘Talking about it doesn’t help me, Rose. I have to get there by myself.’
‘I understand. But I didn’t want you to think that I didn’t care, or that you can’t speak to me if you have to.’ Rose floundered for the right words. ‘I just feel so helpless.’
Elizabeth suddenly started crying.
‘She’s hungry,’ said Violet. ‘Could you give me the milk bottle?’
‘Shall I give her a drop more brandy?’ Rose asked.
‘No. But you can pour me one,’ Violet joked despite herself.
‘We’ll both have one.’ Rose hurried out to the kitchen to find some glasses.
Violet picked up her baby and cradled it in her arms. Elizabeth had her eyes: round and blue. She had her father’s smile, though, when she chose to. Violet hushed the baby softly and stared out of the living-room window. It was a sunny afternoon, warm for February. Seven Sisters Road bustled with activity beyond the glass: men in uniforms, women with babies. Violet Frayne suddenly felt very small and very alone. ‘Pull yourself together,’ she remonstrated with herself as she started to cry again. ‘Must be strong. Have to be strong.’
Rose walked them to the bus stop about an hour later. They kissed each other goodbye and promised to meet more regularly. Rose slipped Violet a small bottle of brandy as the bus trundled up. ‘For whoever needs it,’ she whispered. The conductor helped Violet to carry the pram onto the bus. She had originally planned to get off at Finsbury Park and then take the Tube to Liverpool Street via King’s Cross. However, her mind wandered back to the bookshop that Rose had mentioned. Violet felt like she deserved a treat and she loved books. She decided to stay on the bus all the way to the West End and then walk down Charing Cross Road.
Central London was a friendly chaos. Violet Frayne pushed her pram against a seemingly endless tide of people. A group of American servicemen smirked at the shop girls in a Woolworth’s store. One pressed his lips tightly against the window. A couple of them caught Violet’s eye, then saw the pram and quickly looked away. She found their attention shaming.
Strange faces and accents milled around her. There were policemen, boiler-suited ARP wardens, couples holding hands, and children. Lots of children, running and shouting. Most of the evacuated children had returned to the capital over the previous few months as the threat of air raids receded. Violet enjoyed the distractions but she didn’t like London any more: compared to Bolden it seemed dirty and noisy.
Bumped and jostled, she turned along Charing Cross Road and made her way south towards Leicester Square. The crowd gradually thinned and she began to pass the various second-hand bookshops. Finally she found Forbes Books. It had a smart dark blue awning and a small table of books outside the window. on the pavement. She ran her hand across a few of them. Treasure Island, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy. None of them particularly inspired her and, in fact, many of them looked rather tatty. Perhaps exposure to the air had damaged them. She went inside.
The shop bell tinkled as she pushed her pram through the narrow doorway. A young man stood behind the counter. He wore severe-looking half-glasses over a thin, angular face. He watched her struggle for a moment before his expression softened and he helped her guide the pram into the centre of the shop.
‘There we are,’ he said. ‘Plenty of room.’
‘Thank you,’ said Violet, her gaze drifting around the shop. It was an impressive sight. Row upon row of new and used books, some beautifully presented as Rose’s had been, others worn and dusty with age. The room smelled of leather. Violet felt a sudden hunger for knowledge that had been absent from her for some time.
‘Was there anything in particular, madam?’ the assistant asked. ‘We have a number of books on special offer.’
‘My sister has some leather-bound editions of Shakespeare that she bought from you. I think they were published by Burlington’s.’
‘Indeed.’ The assistant guided her to the back of the shop. ‘We bought them as a lot. They’re rather well put together. Burlington produced a whole series like that. English classics, you know: Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy and so forth. Sadly, there’re only a few remaining. They’ve proved rather popular.’
Violet looked at the shelf: there were six books bound in the same attractive black covers as Rose’s copy of Macbeth. She scanned the titles: Titus Andronicus and A Winter’s Tale. She didn’t like either of those. The Mayor of Casterbridge and Joseph Andrews. She already owned a copy of the former and despised the latter. The last two books were more promising: Great Expectations and Donne: Complete Works. She took them both off the shelf as the shop assistant padded back to his chair at the counter.
Both were in excellent condition. She smelled the leather on them before opening each in turn and delicately turning the pages. Great Expectations was her favourite novel and Donne her favourite poet. She resolved to buy them both and handed over the seven shillings and sixpence for each with a warm glow of satisfaction. The assistant wrapped them carefully in paper and wished her a good afternoon before returning to his own copy of An Ideal Husband.
Violet tried to get her bearings as she stepped into the light. The Underground was probably the quickest way to get to Liverpool Street but negotiating the stairs with a pram would be exhausting. Better to get a bus. She turned right and headed up towards Tottenham Court Road where she hoped to find a bus stop. She eventually found the correct stop and stood at the end of a queue. Boredom quickly overcame her and she turned to look into a shop window: the shop sold antiques and Violet gazed at a beautiful bracket clock.
It had been made by Frodsham of Gracechurch Street and was fixed in a highly polished mahogany case with a bright brass inlay and matching brass hands. It was in excellent condition. She guessed it had been made around 1820. It seemed a fair price. Had she been intending to buy it, Violet would have insisted on seeing the mechanism: the hands were frozen at half-past six.
The explosion came from behind her and to her right. There was no warning. The noise was vast and sudden, a terrible dull metallic crash. There was a tremendous rush of air and as Violet half-turned in shock she was blown against the shop window, which imploded and shattered in her face. The air was thick with flying glass. Splinters spat at Violet Frayne’s legs and arms, and then, horribly, tore into an eye. She was aware of a terrible pain in the side of her face. Lying on a carpet of debris, she raised her hand to her face and felt a shard of glass jutting from her left eye. Her hands were warm with blood. She could hear people screaming, sirens beginning to wail. She reached out blindly for Elizabeth. The pram had been blown onto its side. Violet could hear Elizabeth crying.
It took an hour for her to be moved. She was taken by stretcher-bearers to the Middlesex Hospital and placed under heavy sedation. Her left eye was removed the following morning after it became obvious that it could not be saved. Two days later, Violet was moved to Moorfields Eye Hospital on the City Road. Here, specialist eye doctors cleaned her wounded socket and tidied up the emergency operation that had been performed at the Middlesex.
She had lost a lot of blood and was exhausted and traumatized. Violet lay for a week, half-asleep and dreaming morphine dreams. She was vaguely aware of Rose at her bedside, of her sister crying, of someone saying that Elizabeth was fine. Rose talked about books and read her poems: Donne and Shakespeare’s sonnets. She talked about the V-2 attack. That people had been killed. That Violet was fortunate to be alive. Clarity gradually returned to her mind and Violet came to realize that she had been desecrated.
Alison Dexter drove to New Bolden Infirmary in a state of shock. Chief Superintendent Chalmers had called her to his office at 7.30 a.m. Accompanied by a senior officer from Huntingdon whom Dexter didn’t recognize and Chalmers didn’t identify, the chief superintendent told her that Inspector Underwood was in hospital recovering from a heart attack. He also told her that there were ‘extenuating circumstances’ and that, with immediate effect, Underwood would no longer be heading the investigation into the New Bolden killings. She would be in temporary charge until a new detective inspector from the AMIP office at Huntingdon could be brought in.
Dexter eventually found a parking space in the hospital car park and, on entering the main building, headed for Ward S6, the cardiac recovery ward. The lift was hot and crowded: Dexter felt a snake of sweat slither down her back. At reception on the sixth floor, a staff nurse directed her along a noisy corridor to a bay at the far end. John Underwood was asleep, surrounded by machines that monitored his pulse and blood pressure. Dexter checked the digital read-outs of the machines: pulse 68 b.p.m., blood pressure 180 over 90. That seemed high. She walked over to the bed and sat down. Underwood stirred, his head moved slightly and he half-opened his eyes.
‘Dex.’ It was no more than a croak, dry and rasping.
‘Look at you, guv.’ Dexter tried to be light-hearted. ‘A right two and eight.’
‘Been better.’ His eyes closed again as exhaustion clamped them shut.
‘You’ve been stupid,’ she corrected him. ‘You’ve been ill for weeks. It’s too much for …’
‘… For someone my age?’ He coughed and pain seared at him. His heart rate jumped to 82 b.p.m. Dexter shifted uncomfortably.
‘Shall I get a nurse?’ she asked.
‘No … no, I’m all right.’ Images rolled across his mind like clouds: the sea, the wind rattling against windows, Julia cowering away from him in terror, Paul Heyer trussed like a turkey. He forced his eyes open and saw Dexter as the clouds began to dissipate. ‘Dex … listen to me.’ He gulped phlegm from his throat and the effort made him wheeze. ‘I think you’re in danger I …’ He gasped for air at the edge of unconsciousness. ‘He’s not performing … not performing. That isn’t the point.’ His eyes closed.
A staff nurse walked up and checked Underwood’s machines. ‘He’s very tired,’ she told Dexter with a faint night-shift smile. ‘Don’t be long.’
‘I won’t,’ Dexter replied as the nurse walked away.
Underwood drifted back from a fragment of a dream about drowning. The drugs had made him extremely drowsy, as if his limbs were filled with water. He focused on Dexter’s sparkling green eyes as they fizzed over his face: he could take them and put them in Julia’s head to make her pretty again.
‘You said he’s not performing, sir, I don’t understand what you mean.’ Her voice snapped him back: her accent was as abrasive as her personality. He summoned the strength to answer her: the will.
‘The audience … he’s not performing … he’s educating, using Stussman.’ He was nauseous now, the room was starting to spin gently away from him. Got to concentrate. ‘You found him … he’ll come for you.’
‘Why didn’t he kill me when he had me, then? Why let me go?’
‘He wanted you to see the Drury woman … to understand … to be improved by it … he killed the couple that found him … why not you – unless he wanted you for something else?’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Dexter assured him. She wasn’t convinced, besides she had green eyes, not blue. She had been told once that they were her best feature.
Only once.
‘What about that Heyer bloke that you went to see? You want me to rattle his cage some more?’ she asked.
A shadow flitted across Underwood’s face. ‘Waste of time. Leave him alone.’ His eyes flickered and closed. Dexter wondered if he would live. She hoped so.
Underwood was speaking again: much softer this time, as if he was muttering something in his sleep. His words ebbed away as unconsciousness overtook him. Dexter’s eyes moved instinctively towards the computer screen next to the bed: 65 b.p.m., 180 over 90. He was OK. Underwood breathed heavily in front of her. He was sleeping. Dexter watched him for a second and then left without looking back.
Dexter’s head ached inside and out as she drove back to New Bolden police station. The morning traffic was thick and the journey was an irritation. Was she in danger? She touched the laceration on the side of her head where the killer had struck her. If he had wanted to kill her he could have done so already. He could even have taken her with him, she mused. If only she could remember his face. He was tall certainly, slim, white. What else? She racked her brain for something. What else did they know? He was clever.
‘Fucking pathetic.’ Dexter slammed her hands against the steering column and cursed the limits of her own imagination. Four people dead and all she could manage was ‘clever’. The traffic began to clear ahead of her and she accelerated hard to vent her frustration. The thing that worried her most now was that she was in charge of the investigation – albeit temporarily. How would she feel if someone else was murdered now? Responsibility burned like the headlights of an onrushing truck.
She drove into the station car park and glided smoothly to a halt. Rain began to spatter on her windscreen. She thought of Elizabeth Drury. How had the killer found her? Dexter had located Drury from a two-year-old newspaper article. Surely the killer hadn’t waited two years to kill her. The thought troubled her as she climbed the stairs to the crime room. Both victims had been mentioned in newspaper articles. That was the only link between them, apart from their names. It had to mean something. Did the killer have access to some database like the one at County Police Headquarters in Huntingdon that could search thousands of old newspapers for specific names? They were expensive systems. Dexter knew some banks and law firms had them. Where else?
Harrison was waiting for her. He looked tired. ‘We’re getting Inspector Tarrant from AMIP tomorrow. They’re bringing him back from holiday.’ Dexter gently closed the door to Underwood’s office and walked through to the Incident Room. ‘What’s up with Underwood?’ Harrison continued. ‘Will he be all right?’
‘Don’t know. He doesn’t look too clever.’ Dexter paused in front of the pictures of Harrington and Drury on the board. Educating us. Why is he educating us?
‘Word is,’ Harrison whispered in Dexter’s ear, ‘he went cuckoo last night. Roughed up his wife and beat up her boyfriend.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Dexter snorted. ‘He’s had a heart attack.’
‘I’m just saying.’ Harrison guided her into a quiet corner of the room. ‘We heard a rumour out of Norwich CID. Jensen knows a DC there.’
‘I’ll bet she does,’ Dexter replied acidly.
‘He told her that our man Underwood was arrested, picked up from some arse-end-of-nowhere cottage and taken to hospital. His wife gave a statement saying that Underwood had broken in, tied up her boyfriend, smacked him on the head and dumped him on top of some cliff.’
‘Bollocks!’
‘I’m being serious. Guess who the boyfriend is?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Paul Heyer,’ said Harrison with a note of triumph in his voice. He knew he had her now. He was wiping her nose in the shit trail her precious boss had left behind him.
‘Heyer? The same bloke—’
‘The same bloke who Underwood supposedly got an anonymous tip-off about, right. The same bloke that me and him interviewed a couple of days ago about Lucy Harrington. Don’t you see? He made it all up, Dex. I’ve been up in the Chief Super’s office taking the flak. This Heyer bloke filed a complaint about Underwood this morning. Assuming he stays alive, Underwood’s up to his neck in the brown stuff.’
Dexter recoiled slightly in shock. She felt betrayed and angry. They had wasted time looking into Heyer: interviewing him, researching him and his company. Time that could have been better used elsewhere. Maybe Drury and the others would still be alive. Then she remembered Underwood, alone and heartbroken, wired to a machine. She banished the thought.
‘If what you’re saying’s true, he’s finished,’ she said quietly.
‘All hail, Inspector Dexter,’ Harrison said, with the ghost of a smile. ‘You shall be king hereafter.’
‘Piss off.’
She walked back to the noticeboard. ‘We’d better get cracking. What else have I missed this morning?’
‘Jensen has taken a PC and started visiting the names on that list of local housebreakers. She’s done two so far: one’s got a gold-plated alibi for both nights, the other’s in a wheelchair.’
‘Brilliant,’ she said bitterly. ‘I knew that list was a waste of time.’
‘Your doctor friend called for you this morning,’ Harrison continued.
‘Leach?’
‘No, the American woman. Stussman.’
‘Has he called her again?’
‘I don’t think so. She said she needed to speak with you.’
‘I’ll call her.’ Dexter reread the names of Elizabeth Drury and Lucy Harrington for the tenth time. ‘Get hold of that list Stussman did for us. We have to find out if anyone else with those names lives locally. We just concentrated on Elizabeth Drury before, now we need to follow up on the others.’
Harrison winced. That would take an age and Jensen was out. ‘OK. I’ll try and second some uniform grunts to help me out. It’s such a slow fucking process. Anything else?’
‘Get someone to look up local antique dealers on the Net. Cambridge especially. Leach reckons our man might have bought himself some Jack-the-Ripper doctor’s bag. It might be worth a look.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said Harrison. It sounded more interesting than trawling through the electoral register. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to the library.’
‘What for?’
‘Underwood thinks that the killer is trying to educate us. I want to have a look at some books on Donne. The answer’s in these poems somewhere. We can’t rely on Stussman all the time. We need to get smart.’
‘By the way, while you’re there –’ Harrison lifted a piece of paper from his desk ‘– you might want to check this out. Drury wrote a book.’
‘What about?’
‘Lard-arses. It’s called The Weight of Expectation. Her secretary told me.’ He handed her the slip of paper.
New Bolden library was a ten-minute drive from the police station. The rain and volume of traffic doubled the journey time. Dexter fumed silently. Everything seemed to take an age. London had traffic problems but it also had benefits. New Bolden still seemed very small to her.
She decided to hold off calling Stussman until she had learned some more about Donne. Half of what the academic said had gone over her head and, in any case, Dexter hated being out-flanked in conversation. She would ambush Stussman with her knowledge when she called her back. Harrison’s comments about Underwood had upset her. The inspector had certainly been behaving strangely and he had confided to Dexter that his wife was seeing someone else. However, Dexter couldn’t believe Underwood would manipulate his position to get at Heyer and then actually attack him. It didn’t ring true. Maybe Underwood had lost it.
The library was almost empty and was gratifyingly warm. Dexter exchanged some uncomfortable pleasantries with Dan, the librarian she had briefly dated. She politely refused dinner and then hurried, as directed, to the literature section. She found the poetry shelves and scoured the titles for Donne. Nothing. She remembered that there had been some texts on Donne when she had visited a couple of days previously. Annoyed, Dexter marched past the newspaper and magazine section and found Dan again.
‘Dan, sorry to be a pain, but all the books on Donne have gone.’
‘They can’t all have gone,’ he sniffed. ‘Some people don’t put them back. Students, mainly. We get a lot of students from Westlands College. Messy sods. I bet your Donne books are lying about in a workroom somewhere. I tell you what.’ He took her gently by the arm and led her towards the library computer system. She shifted slightly, uneasy that he had touched her. ‘Have a look on this. It’s our central database. If your books are here it will tell you. If they’re out, it will tell you when they should be back.’ Dexter winced slightly: Dan’s breath smelled of stale coffee and constipation.
He leaned over the glowing console and typed in a few instructions. The screen changed. He stood up. ‘There you go. That’s the search page. Just type in the author you’re looking for and you’re away.’
‘Thank you, Dan.’
‘No problemo!’ He grinned and headed back to his book stacks.
Dexter cringed. Nobody said things like ‘No problemo’ any more. And she had got off with the bloke: twice, in fact. What had she been thinking? She scratched her head thoughtfully and sat down in front of the computer terminal. She used the cursor to click the name ‘Donne’ into the on-screen keyboard. Lines of information appeared:
Search results: Five matches
First Match
Author: Donne, John
Title: Complete Works
Class Mark: 604.111’ 282
Year: 1946
Material Type: Non-Fiction
Language of Text: English
Copies: 1
The other books were listed below. She selected the first entry and pointed her cursor at the ‘Status’ key at the bottom left of the screen. The computer paused for a moment, then displayed its results:
Copies: 1
Copy in Library
It looked like Dan had been right. She repeated the process with each of the five entries and received the same response each time. According to the computer, all the Donne books were in the library. Or they’ve been nicked, she thought. Dexter glanced around: the workrooms were all upstairs, adjoining the reference section. She walked up the central stairway and moved through the reference area towards the three workrooms. A man and a woman were working at opposite ends of one room: both looked up at her as she entered. She smiled apologetically and closed the door again. All the other rooms were empty and there were no books lying around in any of them. She swore beneath her breath and returned down the stairs to the computer terminal. Dexter wasn’t academically minded and the silent stillness of the building brought back uncomfortable memories of school and hot exam rooms. She undid the top button of her blouse and looked at the screen again.
This time she typed in ‘Donne’ as a search term rather than an author name and got twelve matches. She scrolled down the list, writing down their class marks. Most looked like academic studies of Donne and all were apparently in stock. She was pleased: someone explaining poetry in simple English was much better than trying to figure out the gobbledegook for yourself. Dexter was about to leave the terminal to seek her list of titles on the shelves when she remembered Harrison’s passing comment about Drury’s book.
She unfolded the note of paper he had given her. The Weight of Expectation. By E Drury. Dexter cleared the search results from the computer and called up the now-familiar on-screen typewriter again. She selected ‘Author Search’ and carefully pointed her cursor arrow at ‘D’. She clicked her mouse. Then ‘R’. She clicked the mouse again. It was a slow system. Something flickered on the screen and she looked up at it.
Drury, Elizabeth J appeared automatically in the prompt box.
Dexter paused. How had that happened? The computer was a mind-reader. She thought for a second and then cleared the prompt box. Again, she selected ‘D’ and then ‘R’ and again Drury, Elizabeth J popped into the prompt box. Dexter pressed ‘select’ and read the search results.
Search results: One match
Author: Drury, Elizabeth J.
Title: The Weight of Expectation: Obesity and Self-Image
Class Mark: 678.094’ 081
Year: 1992
Material Type: Non-Fiction
Language of Text: English
Copies: 1
Dexter tried to marshal the thoughts that were flying at her. Dan was hovering nearby. She caught his eye and waved him over.
‘What’s up?’ he asked through his yellow teeth.
‘I have a question.’ She was trying to keep a lid on her excitement. ‘I’m doing an author search, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So, I clear the box like so …’ She clicked her mouse and deleted the text in the prompt box.
‘And then I type in the name of the author I’m after.’
‘Correct.’
‘So here goes. D, then R.’
Drury, Elizabeth J appeared again in the prompt box.
‘Why does that happen?’ Dexter asked sharply. ‘Why does a name appear in the box even though I’ve only typed in two letters? There must be loads of names that begin with D R.’
Dan nodded. ‘It’s a time-saving device in the software. It’s a default setting. When you typed in DR, the program defaulted to the last name beginning with DR that a user entered. In this case Drury. You’ve been looking for books by John Donne, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So watch this.’ Dan cleared the screen and typed in D, then O. Immediately, Donne, John flashed up in the prompt box. ‘Do you see what I mean? You were the last person to type DO into the author search. So the program automatically reverts to its last search command that began with the same letters. In case you’re the same person coming back and repeating your search. Like I say: it’s to save time.’
Dexter nodded but didn’t speak.
‘Anything, else?’ Dan asked. Dexter shook her head slowly. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it,’ he added as he walked away.
Dexter wasn’t listening. She felt a cold rush of excitement and again typed in DR:
Drury, Elizabeth J.
She was struggling to organize her thoughts. The system defaults to the last entry beginning with those letters. So someone was searching for Elizabeth Drury’s book recently. It’s a public database. Public information, like the newspaper articles. Has the killer used this terminal? All the Donne books are missing. Maybe he took them. He’s clever. He’s local. He wouldn’t want his name and address in the library records. The killer used this library. He touched this terminal. Fuck. Can they lift off the keyboard or the computer screen? Jesus Christ. Think. Think. There could be dozens of partial prints on the terminal. But what if one matched a police record of violent offenders or housebreakers?
Dexter stood immediately and walked over to Dan. She told him to turn the computer terminal off and to stop anyone from using it. He did so and put dust covers over the screen and keyboard. Outwardly calm but shaking with nervous excitement, Alison Dexter pulled her mobile phone out of her handbag and walked out of the library’s main entrance.
She pressed her fast-dial button for the police station and waited for a reply. Rain streamed off the canopy over the library’s glass doors, rippling the puddles spreading on the pavement. She decided to finish the call before making a dash for her car. The line connected and Harrison answered.
‘Incident Room.’
‘Dexter here.’
‘What’s up, Alison?’
‘Get a print team down to New Bolden library. I think the killer might have used the computer terminal they use to find books.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘I’ll explain it later.’ She squinted up at the clouds that tumbled unhappily overhead. ‘There’ll be lots of prints on the keyboard but we might get a partial. Our man might have a record. It’s something.’
‘I’ll send one of Leach’s boys down. We might have to bring the machine in to the lab.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Are you coming back now?’
‘No. I’ll hang around here until the print team turns up. I’ve got some calls to make.’
She hung up. Now she needed Stussman’s phone number. Dexter reached into her bag for her notebook and rummaged among its contents. No notebook. She must have left it in the car. Rain hammered down hard on the concrete: it seemed to roar back at her. The noise reminded Dexter of standing outside Upton Park as a child and listening to the chants and roaring of the football crowd inside. If she ran to the car she would get soaked. Could she call Stussman later, when the rain had stopped? That didn’t strike her as very professional: she was running the investigation now, after all.
‘Oh, fuck it,’ she muttered and dashed out into the rain. The car park was at the back of the library and Dexter tried to use the side of the building to protect herself from the brunt of the downpour. It made little difference. She was drenched almost immediately and felt water running down the back of her neck. She hated that feeling. It made her shiver.
Her Mondeo was parked under an elm tree about fifty yards from the exit barrier, sandwiched between an exhausted-looking Fiesta and a white van. She fumbled with her keys at the driver’s door. She could see the notebook on the passenger seat and swore at her stupidity. She would have flu now for sure: that was all she needed. Finally the car door opened and she leaned inside, stretching over the handbrake and reaching for her book.
Crowan Frayne stepped out from behind the Escort van. It was time. He seized the driver’s door of Dexter’s Mondeo and slammed it hard against her legs. Half inside the car, Dexter fell face down against the seat. The pain in her legs was agonizing and she felt a sudden surge of panic. She tried to extricate herself from the car but the door slammed again on her legs. She screamed for help: her right leg felt as if it was broken. It was bleeding, too: she could feel blood flowing warmly against her chilled skin. Got to get out … got to get out. Crowan Frayne was quickly inside the car. Dexter felt his weight against her back: the pressure was intense and she thought her spine might snap. She shouted for help but Frayne pushed her face into the upholstery. She couldn’t move. She steeled herself for the blow that she knew was coming.
‘It’s the yeare’s midnight,’ said Crowan Frayne softly.
Dexter, using her last vestiges of strength, twisted her head sideways and for the first time stared the killer of Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury in the eye.
‘You fuck …’ she gasped. ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’
Crowan Frayne tightened his grip on her neck. ‘I am every dead thing.’ He pushed Dexter’s face into the seat and punched her hard, twice, in the side of her skull. He knew that the cranial shell was at its thinnest by the temples and he had aimed his blows with precision. Dexter’s body went limp. Crowan Frayne got out of the car and looked around. The car park was empty. The rain had kept everyone inside. He opened the back doors of his Escort van and dragged Dexter’s unconscious form along the side of her car. With an effort, he hauled her inside before climbing in himself and slamming the van doors shut behind him.
He crouched over her. Dexter was groaning softly, her leg bleeding onto the wooden floor of the van. Frayne reached into his toolbox and withdrew his roll of masking tape. He gagged her and bound her hands and feet. He then rolled Dexter onto her side and pushed her into a foetal position. He looped a length of washing line around her neck and tied the ends tightly to her ankles and her wrists. If she moved her hands or legs the cord would tighten around her neck. She was a cop and Frayne did not plan to take any chances with her.
He touched the wound on her leg. The blood felt warm. He held his hand up to the light and watched the fluid form into a droplet and hang in the air. Frayne thought of the millions of dead compressed into the tiny red stalactite. Just as all matter had burst from a tiny particle, infinitesimally small, so had the memories and goodness of a thousand generations of life been fused and dissolved into Dexter’s blood. He would bind them with his own in an infinite multiplication: a beautiful amplification of their intelligences. Frayne suspended the pendulous droplet above his open mouth, watched it ripen and bulge, then felt it drop onto his dry tongue.
Frayne savoured its metallic taste spreading in his mouth. He sensed electricity as he drew the goodness up into himself like his favourite laburnum tree.
Once he was satisfied that Dexter had been immobilized, Frayne climbed into the front seat of the van and reversed out of the parking berth. Following Dexter had been considerably easier than he had originally imagined it would be. He had noted her car and registration number outside Elizabeth Drury’s house after their first meeting. The thick traffic had slowed Dexter’s car and he had trailed her from the station to the hospital, back to the station and then to the library without incident.
Frayne swung his Escort 1.8d onto the large roundabout opposite the library and headed for the east side of town. Home.
Heather Stussman was angry and panicky. It was well after nine now and no one had called her back. She had called New Bolden police station three times already that morning and had still failed to speak to either Underwood or Dexter. She was confident that she had discovered something. That she had answered the killer’s question: when is the world a carkasse?
It is the yeare’s midnight today, she thought. The world is a carkasse now. Today is St Lucy’s Day. Someone is going to die today. Maybe the killer. Maybe me.
Was she going mad? Maybe she’d been mad to come to England in the first place. Heather Stussman had never really known fear before: a certain nervousness when her academic articles were published, maybe, but nothing like this. She had taken a small carving knife from her kitchenette and placed it in the pocket of her cardigan as a precaution. She held it with her right hand. The steel felt cold against her skin. There was another knife under the pillow of her bed. They didn’t reassure her. Neither did fresh-faced Constable Dawson who sat reading the newspaper outside the door to her rooms. In the US cops carried guns.
The college clock bonged once outside her window: it was nine-thirty. She would give them an hour. Then she would call again.
February 1967
New Bolden
Elizabeth Frayne died in childbirth. She had a weak heart that collapsed on her during labour. No one had known of its weakness and the doctors had been unprepared. One said it was a miracle that they managed to save the baby. Elizabeth was unmarried: she had kept the identity of the child’s father a secret.
The funeral was simple and immediate. Rain whipped bitterly across New Bolden Cemetery, whirling grit around the grave. Droplets of water gathered on the funeral casket, merging and rolling off the sides like tears as Violet watched. The open ground yawned in front of her. Violet wished it would suck her down in her daughter’s place. The ceremony was over in a matter of minutes. Two of Elizabeth’s friends from the library attended. Violet did not invite them back home afterwards.
She collected her baby grandson from her neighbours and took the boy inside. He was big: over nine pounds at birth and much heavier now. He burbled as she nursed him. How would she manage? Twenty-two years of struggle and she was back where she started: holding a baby and wondering what on earth she could do. Twenty-two years and she had made no progress. God had a dark sense of humour, heaping grief upon grief on her shoulders. She looked at the baby and thought for an instant that it was no more pathetic, no more vulnerable and helpless than she was: a molecule of water in a vast directionless tidal wave. She banished the thought.
She had agonized over whether to have the baby adopted. She was middle-aged, she told herself; she didn’t have the energy to start over again. She had faced disaster three times before: when she had become pregnant with Elizabeth, when Arthur had been killed and when she had lost her eye. On each occasion she had looked deep into the abyss and, from somewhere, had summoned the will to fight on.
The baby started to cry and she stroked his brow softly. When Arthur had died she had come to believe that there was no God. However, her logical schoolteacher’s mind quickly argued her out of that position. If there was no God then all life was meaningless – Arthur’s existence and death had been meaningless. But she knew that in the happiness they had shared, there was meaning. There had to be meaning here too, she reasoned as she stared down at her grandson. Perhaps she hadn’t been tested enough. Perhaps this was another test of will and belief. She would fight again. She would defy her interfering God.
She thought of her daughter, dead and gone. No way to say sorry, no way to say goodbye. They had grown apart. Violet had got married some nine years previously. It had proved to be a mixed blessing: an arrangement born more of necessity and mutual convenience than affection. Elizabeth had hated her new father, his coarseness and the smell of alcohol that followed him around the house, his rages and his brooding, his alternating gentleness and violence. A week after her eighteenth birthday, Elizabeth had left home and started work at the Bolden library. Violet felt a sudden rush of guilt and loneliness. Elizabeth was gone.
Violet carried the baby into the kitchen and rested him in his cot. She could hear her husband snoring in the lounge. She imagined the newspapers and the mess of food and dirty plates. Bill Gowers had been a merchant seaman during the war. She had met him at a Remembrance Day service in Bolden. They had become friendly and started meeting for drinks. Bill had worked on the Atlantic convoys during the war, just as Arthur had done. Violet sat quietly and listened while Bill drank whisky and told his stories: of U-boat attacks, of black Atlantic skies strewn with glittering stars, of storms and of waves that smashed down upon the decks as if they were the wrath of God Himself, of burned and lost ships, of friends with daft nicknames, of fear and resolution.
She realized years later, lying in the darknesses of their marriage, that Bill’s stories had made her feel closer to Arthur; for a while, they closed the gap that his death had opened. They had allowed her to enter an imagined world, where she could seek out the only man she had truly loved. When she finally realized that Arthur wasn’t hiding behind Bill’s reminiscences, the stories became a horror to her and she punished her new husband with a coldness that he couldn’t understand.
A name. The baby had to be given a name. The reality dawned on her out of the blue. It was her first responsibility. She sat on a hard kitchen chair and rocked the cradle as she thought. ‘Arthur’ was her first choice but Bill would not appreciate that. He knew a little about Arthur. There was no point turning her husband instinctively against the baby.
Violet considered the names of some English kings: Richard, Henry, George. They were all possibilities but none of them appealed particularly. Then an idea dropped into her head. Arthur’s surname had been ‘Crowan’: Able Seaman Arthur Crowan. She had never told this to Bill. She had been half worried that Bill might actually have known him personally: Violet hadn’t wanted Bill intruding on her imagined world. Arthur’s blood was in the baby, it was only right that his name was used. ‘Crowan Frayne’: she liked that. It fused her with Arthur.
Once she was dead, Crowan Frayne would be the only proof that her happiness with Arthur had meant anything, or had even taken place at all. She decided that Crowan was the meaning, the purpose that was hidden in her sadness. She resolved to throw her heart, mind and soul into the child. His success would be her revenge on a vengeful universe.
Marty Farrell, the New Bolden scene-of-crime officer, approached the front desk of the library and asked for Sergeant Dexter. He carried a standard police fingerprinting kit and water ran off his waterproof jacket onto the floor. The young female librarian looked at him blankly for a second and then remembered.
‘Oh, you’ve come about the computer terminal.’
‘That’s right. Is Sergeant Dexter around?’
‘You should speak to Dan, really – he was dealing with her.’ Dan was standing guard over the newly covered keyboard and computer screen. Farrell nodded and walked over.
‘I’m Marty Farrell from New Bolden police.’ He waved his ID at Dan, ‘I understand you’ve been dealing with my sergeant.’
‘Alison,’ said Dan. ‘Yes, although I don’t know where she’s got to. She told me to isolate this terminal and keep it covered up. Does that make sense?’
‘Probably.’
A small group of curious onlookers had gathered to watch. Farrell looked around for Dexter. Where the hell was she? The useless tart. Doing her bloody make-up, most likely. He couldn’t work under these conditions. Besides, it was boiling hot in there. He made a quick decision.
‘I’ll need to take this terminal back to the station with me.’
Dan looked surprised. ‘Is it evidence? Has there been a crime?’
Farrell ignored him. ‘Is there a back entrance to this building? Like a delivery entrance?’
‘Absolutely. Access is from the car park.’
‘OK. I’ll bring my van right up to that entrance. I don’t want to compromise the computer by getting it wet – and it is pissing down out there. I’m going to disconnect the terminal and then bag each component part individually. Then we’ll take them to the delivery door and we’ll put the bags straight into my van. Understood?’
‘No problemo.’
Farrell knelt and opened his box of equipment. He took out four large plastic evidence bags and put them on the table next to the computer. ‘Did Sergeant Dexter say when she would be back?’
‘No, she just ran out with her mobile about forty minutes ago. I haven’t seen her since. She’s like that, isn’t she? Impulsive, I mean.’
Farrell ignored the question and handed Dan a typewritten form. ‘This is your receipt. I fill out the top section but you’ll need to sign it before I leave. We’ll contact you when we’ve finished with the item.’
‘I’ll have to get the chief librarian. I’m not an official signatory,’ said Dan sadly.
Farrell took a deep breath and turned his attention to the computer. It took him fifteen minutes to secure each of the major items: the screen, the keyboard and the hard drive. He also bagged the mouse and the mouse mat. Dan helped him carry the bags to the back of the library and Farrell made a dash for his van across the rainswept car park. Backing up to the entrance, he saw Dexter’s car parked opposite the back wall of the library. The driver’s door was open.
Farrell quickly loaded the evidence bags into the airtight containers inside his van and then jogged over to the car. It was definitely Dexter’s. Blue Mondeo. T69 MPF. He always remembered her licence plate as its initials were MPF, like his own: Martin Peter Farrell. Farrell looked in the driver’s door and then looked around; Dexter was nowhere to be seen. ‘Dozy bird,’ he muttered to himself and was about to slam the door shut when he noticed blood on the driver’s seat and on the inside of the door.
June 1978
He was an intelligent child; a quick learner. He had an aptitude for language and music that Violet knew had come from the Fraynes. He had a shock of dark hair that shone when it was brushed and furious eyes that constantly sought connections and explanations. Crowan received good school reports, although some teachers expressed a concern that his quiet nature had made him something of an outsider. Violet wasn’t concerned. Her grandson was intelligent and healthy: he had ideas and interests that were beyond his years. They would sit together reading at night, while Bill Gowers watched television and drunk himself to sleep. They would read Shakespeare, each taking different parts and performing to each other.
Crowan liked the ‘seven ages of man’ speech from As You Like It. He particularly relished the infant ‘mewling and puking’ in his nurse’s arms. Crowan spat the words out with such venomous clarity that Violet couldn’t help but smile. She taught Crowan to play the piano that she had inherited from Rose and gradually guided him through her sister’s book collection. He was too young to enjoy Dickens and Hardy and his sallies into Nicholas Nickleby and Jude the Obscure never lasted longer than a couple of chapters. However, he enjoyed the rhythms and colour of poetry: the rhymes made the poems easier to remember. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was his favourite, although Violet steered him gently but insistently towards Wordsworth and Donne.
Donne grabbed his attention. The language often confused him but he liked the simple images at the centre of some of the poems. He could recreate the picture in his mind and then work the language around it. Violet understood this and deliberately chose poems with a vivid conceit at their heart to help her grandson understand more rapidly. Crowan especially liked ‘The Flea’. Its simple, colourful images became rooted in his mind and he listened rapt as Violet explained the poem to him. ‘The poet is annoyed with his girlfriend because she won’t kiss him. So he points out a flea to her and says that she let the flea bite her so she should at least allow him to kiss her! Like this.’ Crowan giggled and retracted as Violet pursed her lips and tried to kiss him. ‘Marke but this flea, and mark in this/How little that which thou deny’st me is/ Mee it suck’d first, and now it sucks theel And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.’
Violet made some unpleasant sucking noises for dramatic impact.
‘So do fleas suck blood?’ Crowan asked.
‘Yes. It’s their food.’
‘Like chips?’
‘Just like chips. So, you see, because the flea has bitten both Donne and his girlfriend, their two bloods are mingled together inside it.’
‘Like a baby.’
Not for the first time, Violet Frayne was surprised at her grandson’s perceptiveness. His mind was so quick to make connections, to find the meaning behind text and ideas.
‘That’s right,’ she said softly, ‘and Donne says to the girl that if she kills the flea by crushing it, then she will actually be killing the three of them: Though use make thee apt to kill mee/Let not to this selfe murder added bee/And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three.’
Bill Gowers appeared at the kitchen door. ‘You’ll make a poofter out of that boy,’ he hiccoughed and opened the fridge.
Violet tensed. ‘Don’t you dare speak like that in front of him.’
‘What’s a poofter?’ asked Crowan Frayne.
‘A pansy. A shirt-lifter. Where’s the bleeding cheese?’ Gowers rummaged in the fridge and eventually found some Cheddar. He cut a hunk of bread from a half-loaf and slapped on some margarine.
‘A pansy’s a flower, isn’t it, Granny? Like a violet.’ Crowan was confused.
‘That’s right, darling,’ Violet replied. ‘It’s a little flower.’ She fired a withering look at Gowers as he added a slab of cheese to his doorstep of bread.
Gowers snorted with derision. ‘Hah! Flowers! That’s right. Little flowers they are. We had a load of them in the Navy and didn’t they smell pretty?’ He bumped into Crowan Frayne as he turned. ‘Get out of my fucking way, you’re always cluttering.’
‘Don’t you touch him, you drunken oaf,’ Violet snarled, ‘or, God help me, I’ll—’
‘What?’ shouted Gowers. ‘What will you do? I’ve been blown up and sunk. Splashing about in the Atlantic in the middle of the bleeding night with the skin burned off me hands. There’s not much you can do that’d scare me.’
‘Just go away.’ Violet felt a cold fury at the man. ‘Let us be.’
Gowers showed his hands to Frayne. The boy had seen the burns before but they still made him shiver. ‘See these, nancy? Adolf Hitler did that and he didn’t bloody scare me either.’ Gowers returned to the lounge and slammed the door behind him. Violet shuddered as she heard the television volume increase.
‘Don’t cry, Granny,’ said Crowan Frayne. He wondered why she only seemed to cry out of one eye.
‘I’m all right, darling.’ Violet brushed the tears from her face and swallowed her pain. ‘Right, then. Where did we get up to?’
‘The second stanza,’ said Crowan helpfully, looking again at his book of poems, beautifully bound in black leather. ‘He’s just told her not to crush the flea.’
‘Thank you. Let’s finish this one off, then.’ Violet continued explaining the poem to Crowan but by now he was only half listening. He was thinking of ways to kill Bill Gowers.
That night Crowan Frayne dreamed that he was trapped inside a flea – swimming in different kinds of blood. Ladies’ blood smelled of pansies: men’s blood smelled of whisky and feet. It washed over him, pouring into his throat. His hands banged against the walls of the flea’s stomach; cloistered in these living walls of jet. He was like a baby, floating in blood. Nancy baby. But he couldn’t be born because he didn’t have a mummy. He felt a great force lift the flea in the air. Blood and fluid swilled against him and his head smashed against the flea’s stomach lining. The flea was being crushed – he couldn’t breathe. The sides of the flea ruptured and a great pressure bore down on him. Cruel and sodaine hast thou since purpled thy nail in blood of innocence? He had been crushed, he had lost his shape. Now he was just blood falling through the air. And he didn’t smell of anything.
After leaving the Merchant Navy, Bill Gowers had worked at Bolden station until it was demolished and rebuilt as New Bolden Parkway in 1965. Gowers was still fond of the railways and each morning would take a long walk along the edge of the track to the South Bolden signal box. He enjoyed talking to the engineers and often stopped for a cup of tea and a bun with Albert Faulks, the signalman. Crowan Frayne often asked Gowers if he could walk with him but Gowers always refused. So Crowan would follow him. He would wait in bed until he heard Gowers slam the front door. Then he’d dress quickly and follow the old man outside.
It was about a four-mile round trip and it took Gowers over three hours, including his stop for tea. Crowan would stay back about a hundred metres: he knew that Gowers’s eyes were bad and he was unlikely to spot Crowan at such a distance. The route took them through the old village allotments, then past the cemetery and on to the railway line. Crowan liked the railway: the rush and energy of the trains, the scrunch of granite shale underfoot. He watched Gowers’s awkward, laborious progress and wondered what it would be like to push the old man under a train. Would he fly into the air or be pulled underneath and sliced apart?
The June morning was bright and fresh but Crowan preferred the security of darkness. He felt conspicuous in the daylight. He held back further, often losing sight of the old man as the footpath twisted through, around and behind the allotments. Crowan wasn’t concerned. There was a film of dew on the leaves like droplets of pearl, or tears: ‘Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares/Hither I come to seek the spring’. He liked Donne’s ‘Twicknam Garden’. Crowan ran his hand softly against the wet leaves, feeling the cold water evaporate against his skin. He rounded a corner in the path and came face to face with Bill Gowers.
‘What are you doing, you little bastard?’ Gowers snarled.
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re following me. I’ll brain you with me stick.’ He waved his walking stick angrily at Crowan. ‘Can’t you give me any peace? Haven’t you messed my life up enough?’
‘I’m going home.’ Crowan turned and started to walk away. Gowers lashed at the back of his leg with the stick. Crowan Frayne felt a rush of pain as he fell to the tarmac.
‘I could kill you, nancy boy, and no one would know. I could tie you to the rails in the tunnel and let the train have you and no one would know. They’d only find bits of you. A leg in Bolden, an arm in Evesbury, and your miserable little head at Liverpool Street.’
‘I’m telling Grandma what you said.’ Crowan Frayne scrambled to his feet. ‘You’re a fucking nancy.’
Gowers cracked his stick at Frayne’s right knee and the boy fell over again. ‘Tell her,’ he snorted. ‘Maybe I’ll do for her as well. I’d be rid of the both of you then. I might get some peace. I could line you up in the bleedin’ cemetery with your mother: be a nice family get-together, wouldn’t it? Now fuck off home and if I catch you sneaking about behind me again I will do you. Understand?’
Crowan Frayne stood awkwardly, the pain stabbing at his knee. His face was red with childish fury and he tried to hobble away. He didn’t look back as tears began to course down his face and Gowers snorted behind him.
‘Go on, cry, nancy boy. See what good that does you!’
Crowan Frayne stumbled back along the path that ran parallel to the railway. A freight train clattered angrily past him and he started with fright. He thought of his mother. He knew that he didn’t have a mummy: that his mummy had died when he was born. Somewhere inside he had always hoped that this was a lie and that one day she would come back for him. But Gowers had said she was in the cemetery, she was in a place under the ground. She wasn’t coming back for him. The path snaked alongside the graveyard. Frayne paused and looked at the hotchpotch of grey and black headstones, the small statuettes and the white bulk of the war memorial. His mummy was in there. She was somewhere. Why hadn’t they told him before? He made a decision and climbed through a gap in the hedge.
It took Frayne nearly an hour to find the headstone. The text on many had faded with time and rain and were hard to read. Elizabeth Frayne’s headstone was black with gold writing. The plot itself was neat and well looked after, in stark contrast with some of the overgrown graves that surrounded it. He read the inscription: Elizabeth Maureen Frayne, 1944–1967. Gone to seek Thee, God. This was the place. She was here. Hiding beneath the flowers and the soil. She had gone to seek God. A rush of thoughts almost overwhelmed Crowan Frayne: frustration, loneliness, disappointment. She had given him life and then deserted him. It would have been better if she had killed him and lived herself. She had left him behind. He hated her.
Violet made egg and chips for lunch. It was Crowan Frayne’s favourite but today it made him want to retch. An egg was like a baby. Was the yolk the brains and the white the body? A baby with no mummy. Like him. He felt sick and pushed the plate away.
Gowers ate loudly and hungrily, eyeing the boy. Crowan hadn’t said anything to Violet about the morning’s confrontation. His grandmother slept in on Saturdays and had still been asleep when he had returned. His knee throbbed uncomfortably.
‘I think I’ll sit in the garden this afternoon,’ Violet said. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’
‘Good. The racing’s on at two,’ Gowers replied between mouthfuls. ‘Take the nancy out with you. I could do with some quiet.’
‘Would you like that, Crowan?’ Violet asked, ignoring the jibe. ‘We could do some sketching.’
Crowan Frayne nodded silently without looking up. Gowers smirked and returned to his Sporting Life.
By two o’clock it was hot outside. The garden hummed with light and colour. Violet had set up a small table and brought out some sketching materials. The air smelled thick and sweet with honeysuckle and lilac. Crowan watched bees hop from flower to flower.
‘Do bees bring food to the flowers, Granny?’
Violet smiled. ‘No. The other way around. Bees drink nectar from inside the flowers. Bees pick up pollen from one flower and carry it to other flowers. It’s how they reproduce.’
‘They draw up nutrients, goodness from the soil, and they use sunlight.’
Crowan Frayne went quiet. ‘Goodness from the soil.’ He knew what that meant.
They started to draw the laburnum tree at the end of the garden. Violet’s depth perception was poor and she drew as much from memory as from what she could actually see. She sensed that Crowan was unusually quiet but stopped herself from asking him why. Sometimes he was best left alone. She looked over at his drawing.
‘That’s good, darling, but don’t try and draw every leaf and twig. You’ll go mad trying. Think about the light: the shapes it makes as it shines through the leaves and branches. Light and dark: simplicity.’
‘OK.’ Crowan Frayne was only half listening. He was thinking of how many dead things had their goodness inside the tree: thousands, probably. One day he would draw them all: people’s arms and legs tangled into branches, flowers and plants twisted and sucked into leaves, dead animals’ bodies bound into roots, Bill Gowers’s tired face gnarled into the trunk.
‘I am every dead thing,’ said the tree softly. Crowan Frayne nodded. He understood.
Violet paused for a moment. She was getting a headache.
‘Crowan, be a love. Could you go and get my glasses from my bedroom? They’re in the chest of drawers. Third drawer down.’
Crowan walked back to the house. He was careful to go by the kitchen door rather than the French windows. He did not want to disturb Gowers. The television blared out an excited horse-racing commentary and he could hear Gowers barking encouragement at his bets. Crowan climbed the narrow staircase and went into Violet’s bedroom. It was cool and dark inside. There was no carpet and the two single beds stood on exposed floorboards. He had rarely been in the room before.
The chest of drawers was in the far corner, next to the beautifully made bed that he knew had to be his grandmother’s. There was a neatly aligned row of expensive-looking books on the top surface of the dresser. He ran a finger along them as he walked past: Shakespeare, Hardy, Dickens, Keats, Wordsworth, Austen, Brontë. The names were becoming increasingly familiar and each conjured images, characters, stories and rhymes to him.
Reaching his destination, Crowan knelt painfully and opened the third drawer down. Its contents were carefully arranged: a diary, a photo album, some writing paper and envelopes, an eyeglass case and a small wooden box. He touched the box with a finger: it felt beautifully smooth as he traced the grain of the wood. ‘V. Frayne’ was stamped on the lid of the box.
Curiosity overcame him. He stood up and lifted the lid. Three glass eyes stared back blankly at him; his face reflected in their blue corneas and fixed black pupils. Crowan Frayne recoiled in shock and dropped the box. It clattered against the edge of the dresser. Two of the eyes fell to the floor and shattered immediately against the floorboards. Then the box hit the floor with a crash. Crowan tentatively crouched and turned it over. The final eye was cracked in three pieces inside the box, its jagged shards resting against the purple lining. It leered horribly at him. Crowan Frayne was sick.
He heard laughter behind him. Gowers stood at the door. ‘You’ve done it now, you silly little bastard!’ He turned slightly and shouted down the stairs. ‘Violet! Violet! Come and see what the nancy’s done.’
Frayne was shaking. He had no idea what had happened. He felt he had violated a dark, private place. Glass fragments lay strewn across the floor. Violet appeared at the door and raised her hand to her mouth.
‘Look at that!’ shouted Gowers triumphantly. ‘He’s only gone and smashed your eyes up, the little bastard. What Hitler started he’s finished. Mind you, the Nazis only got one of your eyes – he’s done three!’
Violet pushed past him and picked Crowan Frayne up from the floor. She sat him on the bed and knelt to start picking up the larger pieces of glass. She said nothing. She felt ashamed; as if a great deceit had been exposed.
‘I expect he done it on purpose.’ Gowers beamed. ‘He’s a vindictive little so-and-so. Now what are you going to do? Them’s expensive things now. And I ain’t paying for a new set.’ He rubbed his chin in glee. He had scored a great victory. ‘You’ll have to wear dark glasses now, like Ray Charles.’
Frayne flew at Gowers across the bed and threw a childish punch at the old man’s mouth. ‘Fucking shut up! Fucking shut up!’ he screamed. ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’ The surprise and the momentum of the assault knocked Gowers back against the wall. He quickly recovered his footing and hit Crowan hard on the chin: the boy fell backwards and banged his head against the dresser. He started to bleed. Gowers picked him up and held him by the throat.
‘You think you’re man enough, do you? Have a go, then. I’ll do you, I swear it. Maybe I’ll tear your eye out to replace the ones you’ve buggered. See how you like it. How about that?’
Violet pushed Gowers away. Crowan fell back onto the bed. ‘Go away, Bill,’ she ordered him firmly. ‘Go away and leave us alone.’ She leaned closer to him and whispered, ‘And if you ever lay a finger on that child again, I will finish you. Do you understand?’
Gowers stared at her. ‘He attacked me, in case you didn’t notice. Ain’t it bleeding fair, eh? I was just defending myself. I’m an old man.’
‘And he’s a child. You should know better. Now go away.’
Gowers grunted and turned away. Violet sat down next to Crowan on the bed and put her arm around him. He was shaking, sobbing without tears. Blood trickled warmly from the back of his head. The boy nodded silently as she explained to him: about the war, the explosion, the glass, her eye. But Crowan Frayne wasn’t really listening.
He was suddenly on a desert planet. It was the first time he had been there. There were no footprints on the sand except his own.
The sand is black and the mountains have eyes: the rocks talk when the sky replies.
Marty Farrell bounded up the central staircase of the New Bolden Police Station and was panting for breath by the time he reached the third floor. Harrison was waiting for him outside Underwood’s office.
‘What’s all this about Dexter?’ Harrison asked.
‘Her car was at the library but I couldn’t find her.’ Farrell paused to catch his breath, ‘The librarian said she went outside and didn’t come back in again. Her car door was open. There was blood on the seat.’
‘Fucking hell.’
‘That’s what I thought. There’s another SOCO and a couple of plods working on the car and taking statements.’ Farrell looked Harrison straight in the eye. ‘You reckon he’s got her?’
‘I hope not. But she found him before. Maybe she found him again.’ Harrison was starting to feel a depressing sense of resignation. ‘We’ve tried her mobile. There’s no reply.’
‘I must have missed him by minutes,’ said Farrell.
Harrison thought for a second. ‘Look, Marty, she wanted us to lift prints off that computer. We should get moving on it ASA-fucking-P.’
‘It’s in the lab now.’
‘Good. You call me if we get a match with anyone who’s got a record. I don’t care what for. This might be our only chance of finding him.’
‘And Dexter,’ Farrell added.
‘And Dexter.’
‘There’ll be a lot of prints. This might take time.’
‘Start by looking at the keys he was most likely to have used. If he was looking for books by John Donne or by Elizabeth Drury he would have had to type their names in.’
‘Understood. Lots of people could have used the keyboard after him though.’
‘True. But some of the letters are fairly uncommon: “Z” and “H”, for example. We might get lucky.’
‘All right. I’ll call you.’ Farrell pushed open the double doors and headed back down to the Forensic Laboratory.
Harrison felt paralysed for a second, wondering what he should do. What if Dexter was already dead? He discounted the idea. The killer could have bashed her brains in at the Drury woman’s house but had decided not to. Maybe he wanted her alive. But what for? A secretary leaned out of the door of the Incident Room and spotted Harrison.
‘Sir?’
He turned towards her. ‘What’s up?’
‘That American doctor’s on the phone again. She’s getting a bit stroppy.’
Harrison returned to the Incident Room and picked up the phone. Stussman was on line two.
‘Dr Stussman? This is DS Harrison.’
‘What is going on down there?’ Stussman sounded furious. ‘This is the fourth time I’ve called this morning and no one’s called me back.’
Harrison held the phone slightly away from his head. ‘Sergeant Dexter was going to call you but she’s – erm – indisposed.’
‘Look, sport, I have information about your killer that might be very important. Shall I tell you or shall I just take out an advert in a newspaper?’
Harrison scrambled around his desk and picked up a pen. ‘Go ahead.’
Stussman took a deep breath. ‘OK … When I last spoke to him he asked me, “When is the world a carkasse?”. He asked me twice, so I guessed that he figured it was important for me to find out.’
‘Go on.’ Harrison couldn’t see where this was going but he was getting desperate.
‘The answer is today. 13 December. He referred to a Donne poem called “A Nocturnall upon St Lucies Day”. I won’t trouble you with the details but St Lucy’s Day used to be regarded as the longest night of the year. In Donne’s time that was 13 December – today.’
‘It’s about mourning the death of the loved one. And it’s about suicide,’ said Stussman.
‘You think he’s going to kill himself?’
‘I think it’s on his mind. He’s lost someone close to him; a mother or a sister, I’d guess. Or a daughter, maybe.’
Harrison was scribbling notes, trying to make sense of Stussman’s comments, trying to link them in with Dexter’s disappearance.
‘Where is Inspector Underwood?’ Stussman asked.
‘He’s ill, Doctor.’ Harrison didn’t see any point in lying. ‘He had a heart attack. Sergeant Dexter has disappeared. We think that the killer might have taken her.’
‘Oh my God,’ Stussman breathed.
Harrison put down his pen. ‘Look, Doctor Stussman, if this bastard makes another attempt to contact you, call me immediately. If you’re right about the date, we don’t have much time.’
‘Agreed.’ She sounded scared.
‘You still have police protection there, don’t you?’ He asked.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You’re perfectly safe. This guy is very methodical, cautious. He’s not just going to walk up and knock your door down.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘If you think of anything else …’
‘You’ll be the first to know.’
Harrison put the phone down and looked around the room. It was chaotic with activity and gossip: phones were ringing unanswered, paper was strewn everywhere. He looked up at the photographs of Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury pinned against the board and thought of Alison Dexter.