fifty-seven

Japan continued to dominate my thinking the following Monday morning. I used my lunch hour to return the phone call to the police in Cheltenham. After negotiating with “rest” days—theirs, not mine—it was agreed I would go in after work on Wednesday. Next, I headed off to the sorting office in Swindon Road to collect the books I’d ordered. It gave me plenty of time to consider Nick Vellender’s interest in ritual suicide. I knew little of such things, only what I’d watched on film. Honour, machismo, and saving face seemed the principal features. A sane person would point out that the fascination might be nothing more than a typical young man’s flirtation with the macabre. I wasn’t feeling sane. To my mind, it represented something deadly. I couldn’t subdue the thought that Nicholas Vellender was playing out a fantasy and punishing those responsible for destroying his life. Her brother had clearly been a heavy influence in Mimi’s life. Why else would she have a scar, like a tattoo, of an avenging ghost on her arm?

About to negotiate road works, traffic converging from different directions, and cars slung up half on the pavement, I felt the same strange gravitational pull of someone watching me as I’d felt the day before. I swung around. All I saw was the back of a guy weaving his unsteady way on a bike, two young women walking arm in arm, and a short stout figure in a hoodie—a flash of dark eyes, nothing ostensibly remarkable and yet somehow oddly familiar. As I watched, whoever it was peeled away in the opposite direction. I could not shake off the impression that the individual was female.

Obsessively scoping the street, a wave of exhaustion washed over me. Wiped out, I wanted to lie down, in the middle of the road for all I cared, and sleep for a straight year. I wanted to make whatever was screwing with my brain stop. I wanted to get my life back on track, without thoughts of murder and mayhem and death careering after me like a star-struck lover eager to lock me in a clinch. How could I counsel others when my own runaway emotions played havoc with my head? Should I even be doing so?

On shaky legs, I crossed over and joined a queue of people waiting to pick up missed weekend deliveries. With only two collection points inside, we snaked around the small, overheated, and airless room. I could smell perfume, tobacco, stale food, and stale bodies. I fixed my eyes on the back of the person in front of me. I tuned out. I flexed the muscles in my arms and legs, tightened and relaxed, allowing the tension to seep out of me. That’s when I thought I was dreaming.

He stood side-on, waiting his turn. Slim, tall, slightly stooped, he had an unmistakable air of vulnerability about him, like a refugee in a country where he did not speak the language. He wore a long dark coat over jeans and trainers, and a black beanie. In profile, his straight symmetrical features and pointed chin were more defined. The whisper of a moustache, evident in the photograph I’d seen, had grown thicker, and there was a fashionable growth of stubble on his cheeks. I listened as he spoke to a postal worker, but his voice was so low I couldn’t hear a word he said. With a parcel tucked under one arm, he turned and walked straight past me. If I had any lingering doubts, they were quickly dispelled. I caught the colour of his eyes, the intensity of his expression, that look that could slice right through a person.

I waited for the door to slam closed after him, dropped out of the queue, and followed. I didn’t think of books or clients or work or appointments or letting people down. I didn’t pay attention to my own mental health. Foolish, stupid, risky, I’d gone way beyond recklessness. Murderer, victim, saint, or sinner, I didn’t know, but Nicholas Vellender could tell me why a young woman had faded away pining for him, and why Troy Martell deserved to die, and in the way that he had, and whether or not an elderly woman had tumbled from a clifftop through accident or malice.

Falling back a little, I watched him walking on the balls of his feet, loose-limbed and quiet. He speeded up. He slowed down. He jinked, crossed, and recrossed the road. Perhaps it was habit. I didn’t believe so. I was as certain as I could be that he’d made me. Still I kept walking, inexorably drawn to follow. I’d have sooner cut off my right hand than turn back now.

A gusty wind kicked up a trail of dust and grit. The sky turned from blue to indigo to sullen grey.

I followed him as he sloped past a restaurant, a snooker club and bar, and a brasserie. I registered these by accident. I didn’t rehearse what I would say or how I would react or what I felt other than that I harboured a burning, blistering anger towards him—for insinuating himself into my life, for turning me inside out, and for causing so much pain to others.

And then he stopped.

And I stopped, too.

His right hand patted the pocket of his coat, as if he’d forgotten something important, like keys or a vital document. Next, he turned on his heel and, with a purposeful stride and razor-blade smile, doubled back towards me.

I froze, glanced at the buildings up ahead, a block of apartments on my right. Tarmac and empty street stretched out before me. It was lunchtime. It was busy, except suddenly it wasn’t. It was he and I in a quiet part of town. A panicked voice in my head told me to run hard and fast and never look back.

But I didn’t.