Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
For ten years, I had been dreaming, and now a letter from America had pulled me awake into a reality I didn’t want to acknowledge, because if it was true that I had been dreaming, I had woken into a nightmare.
Chapter 2
At the end of that week of waking, I went to see Hunter.
It was a beautiful and hot day in early May, and we left his rather stuffy and dark rooms and walked out to the Backs. The trees towered above us, in full bright green leaf, and students and tourists eyed each other on the river.
We saw none of that, as I told Hunter about the letter. He had all the same questions, and I told him that I’d written to Marian’s mother, asking how she had died, and where exactly she was buried. And about the Estonian.
‘When did you send it?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t yet. I wrote it last night. I’ll send it later today.’
‘Are you sure you want to?’
He stopped walking for a moment, which I took to be a sign that this was an important question.
‘Yes. I think so. Why?’
‘Consider the old girl, Charles. There she is, sitting in her big house, sad, but happy in her memory of her daughter, and she gets another letter raking up the past. Are you sure you want to do that to her?’
I can see now that he had a point. I didn’t then.
‘She said herself in her letter that she wanted me to know the truth, so I didn’t have to live not knowing. I’m only doing the same for her.’
‘But she does know. Or she thinks she does. She presumably thinks her daughter was run down by a motor car, or drowned in the Seine, or whatever they told her. She’s dealt with that and, from what you’ve said, it sounds like she’s come to a point of peace with it. And you want to tell her the truth, the real truth, but you don’t even know what that is. That some man you saw in a tunnel in the war killed her?’
I shook my head.
‘I don’t know. I . . .’
I stopped. I found it hard to think, let alone to explain.
‘You don’t know what happened any more than she did. Are you sure this Estonian was even the man in the bunker? What makes you think he had anything to do with Marian’s death, however that happened? You have no proof of that.’
There I had to disagree with Hunter.
‘No, on the contrary, I think it highly unlikely that Marian died in an accident when she was also consorting with a murderer. That’s the most likely explanation.’
‘The two are not connected,’ Hunter persisted. ‘You’re displaying false logic. It’s just as likely that she died from some other cause as by his hand, and anyway, there is absolutely no evidence to show he had anything to do with her death. Tell me! What would you say if you walked into a French police station? That some man you once saw just once, mark you, dining with the young lady, is a murderer? Why? They’d laugh at you. It was all so long ago, Charles. Why don’t you leave it be? Wouldn’t that be better?’
‘It’s not a question of better,’ I snapped at him. I regretted it immediately, but I could see my anger had hurt him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I stared at the punters on the river as if I was looking straight through them. ‘I’m sorry, Hunter.’
We parted soon after that, and I was left thinking about what Hunter had said. Why not just let it go?
He was right, it would probably be better to do so, but it wasn’t a question of what was best. It was a question of what I had to do.
I’d mourned Sarah when she’d died, of course, but it was only with Marian’s mother’s letter that tears had come, and now it seemed they would not stop.
I had to find out what had really happened, and though Hunter was right that I had nothing I could ever report to the police, I knew that Verovkin was in some way connected, was responsible.
How did I know?
All I had to do was shut my eyes, and think my way back to a hole in the ground in Paris as the city erupted in jubilation, and there, in that hole, was that man.
Looking at me.
And it was that look that told me I was right.
He had killed Marian.
Chapter 3
At the end of May I managed to get away to Paris for a few days. I had in the end sent a revised version of my letter to Margery Fisher, in which I asked for details of Marian’s death, but said nothing of my fears.
Arriving in the city by train, I began to hunt around the Place de Clichy, but I found nothing. No one at Marian’s old address had ever heard of her; Jean, the barman in her local, had moved on too, no one even remembered him, though strangely, in that frustrating way in which memory often behaves, after ten years I had been able to recall his name when before I couldn’t.
I went out to Saint-Germain, to the street where Verovkin had had his practice, and though my heart began to pound even at the end of the road, it was an unfounded fear. The little brass name plaques were still there, but Verovkin’s had gone. There were even four little holes and a rectangular patch of stone of a different colour where it had been, yet that strange nothing comforted me, let me know I was not imagining it all, because it meant he had moved on.
I set out to find him, but I failed.
All my searches came to naught and I had to return to Cambridge before Monday’s round of lectures.
A week slipped by, a week more, and I sulked in an uneasy mood, downcast and angry at my impotence. I ghosted my way through my working day and every night I sat in a chair in my living room, staring at the hearth, though there was no fire lit, listening to the Third Programme and whatever it chose to broadcast into my home.
I heard none of it. All I could hear and see in my mind were a series of voices and images, memories of Marian, and dreams of what might have become my life, had she not been killed. This state of affairs continued without an apparent end, until one night when I got home from work and found, at last, a reply to my letter to Marian’s mother.
Slipping off my coat and shoes, I carried the letter into the kitchen, and tore it open.
It was much shorter than the first one and, I felt, less friendly. I wondered if I had given some offence, but I put that aside, because Margery Fisher gave me the name of a Parisian cemetery.
As I read the letter, I felt something warm tap my stockinged feet.
I looked down, and saw that the toes of my brown sock were dark and wet, and for a moment I stood staring stupidly at them, until I saw another drop of blood fall. I turned my hands over and saw I had given myself a large paper cut along the side of the left ring finger. I must have done it as I opened the letter, and in my state of mind not even noticed.
Another drop welled from the cut and slid down my wrist now that I had turned my hands over. I dropped the letter on the table and shoved my finger in my mouth, only now noticing that I was in pain.
With my finger still in my mouth I went to the cupboard under the stairs and awkwardly, with my right hand, fished out the box where I kept first aid; and as I did so I sucked the blood.
I remembered something we’d been told when I was a medical student, that the taste of blood – that supposedly metallic taste – only arises when blood comes into contact with skin, as an oxidation reaction occurs between the fats of the skin and the iron in blood.
What then is the natural taste of blood?
our lecturer had put to us, telling us it would be different, and I remember darkly wondering how he knew, because who has drunk enough blood to be free of that metallic reaction with the skin?
A strange thing, though, I thought, as I moved back into the kitchen with the first-aid shoebox: why are we happy to taste our own blood, when other bodily fluids we do not rush to taste? And yet to Dante, so Hunter and Marian had told me, these other fluids – mother’s milk, to nourish the newborn; semen, the seed that creates the newborn in the first place – were but the various distillations of that one divine substance,
sangue perfetto
. Blood was at the heart of it all. At least for Dante, and Aristotle, the source of his theories.
But it made me think: who has not put their finger to their mouth and tasted it? I remembered that as a boy I used to have a lot of what I would describe to a colleague as epistaxis, but which to me, at the time, were nosebleeds, prolonged and heavy. I would lie on my back while my mother slid a key down my neck to draw the blood away. I think even then I doubted if that was doing any good, but meanwhile I would press a flannel to my nose and wait until the bleeding had stopped, pulling it away to reveal a clotted nose and a white facecloth drenched in red. I must have tasted a lot of my own blood then, but I couldn’t remember what it tasted like.
All these thoughts rumbled along in my mind while I fiddled with the plasters in the shoebox, fumbling with my right hand to find and place a sticking plaster on my left ring finger. Being left-handed, it was my clumsy right that was given the job, and I botched it the first time, and the second. Trying for a third time, my eye fell on Margery’s letter again, and I saw I had dropped it face down on the table, and that it continued on the back.
I saw one word and stopped what I was trying to do with the plaster and my bleeding hand. All thought of that was gone as I saw that one word:
beast
. I must have stared at the paper as if the words upon it were on fire.
I snatched it up again, and I read that Marian had been found, murdered, it was thought, by a killer who had struck before in the area, and whom the press had dubbed ‘the Beast of Saint-Germain’.
Margery said little more than that, and I could see my letter had dragged up old sufferings. Hunter had been right, and I felt awful, but I didn’t regret what I’d done, because it had given me two pieces of information I needed desperately.
Firstly, I knew that Jean, the barman, had lied to me. He had told me Marian had a weak heart, and had been obliged to go home to the States. Why had he done that? The only, the obvious, conclusion was that he was known to Verovkin, was an ally of his, and I decided that I would perhaps do better to pick up his trail than that of the elusive margrave.
And secondly, I knew where Marian was buried, and I wanted that so much because I wanted to be close to her again. Even just once, though she had been dead under the grass for ten years, because I knew now that she’d been taken. She had not gone naturally into death. She had been taken, against her will, and with horrible violence.
Anger suddenly poured out of me, rising from nowhere so that I cried out and swept the back of my left hand across the table, smashing the shoebox, sending it flying across the room to the kitchen wall, where it scattered its contents on the floor. I hung my head and looked at the mess I’d made, not failing to see the drops of my own blood that had splattered the white wall.
I stood waiting for the anger to subside and of course it did, but it did not disappear altogether. Rather it turned into a sort of determination, so that three weeks later I grimly found my way to Paris again.
I located Marian’s grave, I stood in front of it, and I wept. I hunted in the libraries and found old newspaper cuttings of her death, as well as of two others reported to be the work of la Bête. And I made a nuisance of myself in Saint-Germain itself, asking around, being nosy, accosting anyone who would listen to me, and so it was that one day I had a conversation with an old working man, a local odd-job man, who told me that around eight or nine years ago, he couldn’t remember, he had been paid five hundred old francs to shift boxes from the
petit palais
at the end of the park on to a small
camion
. He told me that although no one had told him where the boxes were heading, he had heard the drivers moaning that it would take three days to drive to Avignon.
So I had it. He was in Avignon.
Chapter 4
I arrived in Avignon in August
1961
, having had to wait until I could take more leave without raising too many eyebrows. I had tried to take a sleeper from Paris, but not having booked, I had to wait a night and take two trains to Avignon the following day. The evening I spent in Paris I was anxious and restless. I had no business there any more. I had taken all I needed from it, and I had paid my respects to Marian at her graveside.
She was buried in Montmartre, just a short walk from where she had lived. It had taken me three hours to find her grave the first time I went, but this time I walked straight to it: a small plot with a simple but decent headstone, which simply gave her name and her dates. It spoke of nothing more. It gave no hint of the horror of her death, of how she had been stabbed repeatedly, at least seventeen times according to the extract from her post-mortem, large sections of which had been faithfully reprinted in
Le Figaro
. I’d read that article again and again, awful though it was, because it was the last mention of Marian in the world that I had, not counting her mother’s letter. Though it was torture to do so, therefore, I pored over it many times, even forcing myself to reread the description of the state of her body; the mass of stabbings, both in her body and in her face. Her face. I felt sick as I read that, but there was worse to come. The surgeon who conducted the autopsy had concluded that the murderer had inflicted these wounds with a knife, but not a particularly sharp one. He guessed it was something like a table knife. Aside from the wounds, her body displayed the marks of teeth on the shoulder, neck and breasts. He had bitten her. He had torn her skin, deeply. Finally the report spoke of the mutilation of her breasts and genitals with the knife. Interestingly – that was how the paper put it – there was no sign of sexual assault. How they could not consider that mutilation of the genitals was not a sexual assault, I was at a loss to understand. I supposed they meant there was no sign of him on her, his semen. That he had not actually raped her.