Authors: Peter Robinson
‘Don’t worry, I will.’
‘When are you planning on going?’ he asked.
‘Well, I’ll have to wait till I hear from Sarah first and make sure she can put me up and get some time off, but I thought I’d go as soon as I can.’
‘And you’ll be coming back before term starts?’
‘Oh yes. That’s not until the beginning of October. I’ll come back and pick up my books and stuff. I’m hoping I can find a flat up there first, too. Perhaps Sarah and I
can share.’
‘Do you think that’s wise?’ her mother asked.
‘It’ll be better than being on my own, won’t it?’
Her mother could offer no argument against that.
‘So,’ her father said, ‘you’re off on an adventure. Well, good for you. You must have known there were times when your mother and I. . . we . . . we didn’t know
what the future was going to bring.’
‘I’m all right, Daddy,’ Kirsten said. ‘Really I am.’
‘Yes, of course. Will you be seeing Dr Masterson at all while you’re up there? About the . . . you know?’
Kirsten nodded. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘It won’t do any harm to ask about it, will it?’
‘No, I don’t suppose it will. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you a lift up there. We’ve got a very important project on at the moment and I just can’t
take time off. Perhaps you could rent—’
‘That’s all right,’ Kirsten said. ‘I was planning on taking the train. I have to learn to get around on my own.’
‘Well, that’s fine, as long as you feel comfortable with the idea. You’ll be needing some money, won’t you?’ he said, and went over to the top right-hand drawer of
the sideboard to fetch his cheque book.
SUSAN
Sue got out of the house easily enough without anyone seeing her and went to celebrate her first housebreaking with veal scaloppine, garlic bread and a bottle of Chianti at the
expensive restaurant on New Quay Road. After that, she stopped off at her room, then walked about a mile along the coast and threw her holdall, weighted down with heavy pebbles, into the sea. She
stood and watched as the tide first threw it back, then sucked it out again and swallowed it. Even if it did turn up somewhere, she thought, it wouldn’t be of any interest to anyone.
Now it was time to put the final stage of her plan into operation. First, let him sweat for a while.
And sweat he did. The first time Sue saw him on the day after she had broken into his cottage, he looked harried and preoccupied as he walked in to work. It was raining, and he kept his hands
deep in his pockets and his head down, but his glittering eyes swept the street and the windows of the houses all around him. He must have noticed her sitting in the front of Rose’s Cafe, Sue
thought, but his eyes just flicked over her as they did everything and everyone else. He was nervous, on edge, as if he was expecting an ambush at any moment.
After he had gone by, Sue turned back to the local newspaper. There was no change reported in Keith’s condition and the police seemed to have got nowhere in their search for Jack
Grimley’s killer. So far, so good. It would soon be over now.
Near lunchtime on the second day, from the same vantage point, Sue saw him slip into the newsagent’s. Quickly, she left her tea and crossed the street to go in after him. He wouldn’t
recognize her. This time, she was dressed differently; also, she wore glasses, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. He glanced around with a start at the bell when she entered, her head
lowered, then turned his gaze back to the newsagent.
‘All right today, love?’ the woman asked. ‘You look a bit peaky.’
‘Not enough sleep, that’s all,’ he mumbled.
‘Well, you take good care of yourself, you never know what germs are going round these days.’
‘I’m all right,’ he said, a little testily. ‘Just tired, that’s all.’ Then he paid for his tobacco and left without even glancing at Sue, who bent over the
newspaper and magazine section as before. She picked up the local paper and the
Independent.
When she took them over to the counter to pay, the woman clucked her tongue and said, ‘I
don’t know what’s the matter with him. Show a bit of polite interest and he damn near bites your head off. Some people can’t even be bothered to be civil these days.’
‘Maybe he’s worried about something,’ Sue suggested.
The woman sighed. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘We’ve all got plenty to worry about, haven’t we, what with nuclear war and pollution all over t’place. But I still manage
to find a smile and a good morning for my customers.’ She went on, almost to herself, as she counted out Sue’s change, ‘Not like Greg Eastcote, that isn’t. Usually such a
pleasant chap.’ Then she shrugged. ‘Ah, well, maybe he is just tired. I could do with a bit of a lie-down myself.’
‘I’m sure that’s it,’ said Sue, folding the newspapers under her arm and walking over to the door. ‘He’s just tired.’
‘Aye. No rest for the wicked, is there, love? Bye now.’
As Sue walked along the street, Eastcote’s van passed her by and took the same route out of town as it had before. Another delivery. Whether he would be back later or would be staying out
overnight, she had no idea. She could imagine, though, that he would be loath to leave his cottage empty for very long. In fact, if she were in his shoes, she would make sure she was back before
dark. After all, he didn’t know that she had broken in during daylight.
She wondered what he had made of the extra lock of hair. Did he know it was hers? Surely he must suspect? Or perhaps he thought he was being haunted, that the supernatural was responsible for
the sudden appearance of a seventh lock? Like the seventh daughter of a seventh son was supposed to be powerful in magic. One thing she did know: he had seen her, as one would notice any stranger
in the street, but he didn’t know who she was. Maybe when he got over the shock, he would start to think clearly again and count the times he’d glimpsed her from the corner of his eye;
perhaps he would connect the girl in the navy-blue raincoat with the girl in glasses and a ponytail. But by then it would be too late.
Sue walked by the river towards town. The good weather seemed to have made a return. It was a beautiful day, with plenty of that intense blue sky you sometimes get at the seaside, and just
enough plump white clouds drifting over to give a sense of depth and perspective. Beyond the greenish shallows, the sea reflected the sky’s bright ultramarine. Sue stood on the swing bridge
and looked around at the harbour. It was like another world to her now, after so long spent in the other, dingier part of town.
The tide was well out, and some of the light boats rested almost on their sides, with their masts at forty-five-degree angles to the slick mud. To Sue’s left, beyond the high harbour wall,
stood the buildings of St Ann’s Staith, a mixture of architectural styles and materials: red brick, gables, chimneys, black and white Tudor-style fronting, even millstone grit. Further along,
towards the sheds where the fish were auctioned, the jumble of buildings rose all the way up the hillside to the elegant white terrace of hotels that formed East Terrace.
People walked by, carefree and smiling: a courting couple, the man with his arm so low around the girl that it was practically in the back pocket of her tight jeans; two elderly ladies
overdressed in checked tweeds and lace-up shoes, one carrying a walking stick; a pregnant woman, glowing with health, her husband walking proudly beside her.
All this normality, Sue thought. All these ordinary people going about their business, enjoying themselves, eating ice-cream cones and bouncing garish beachballs in the street, and they have no
idea about the monster walking among them.
They have no idea that Greg Eastcote murdered six women and maimed one, that he slashed at their sexual organs with a sharp, bone-handled knife, and just to make sure they were dead, he
strangled them. When he’d done that, when he’d finished his crude surgery, he carefully cut off a single lock of hair from each bruised and bleeding body, took it home with him, tied it
up in a pink ribbon and placed it neatly in his sideboard drawer. Six of them all in a row. Seven now.
According to the press clippings that Sue had saved, he hadn’t raped any of his victims. Clearly he was incapable of that, and the rage he felt towards women for causing his condition
partly explained his actions. But only partly. There was an enormous chasm between his motives and his deeds that nobody could fathom. In a vision, the Dark One had appeared to him in a perversion
of the Caedmon story and told him to sing his own song. And so he had. Only his accompanying instrument wasn’t a lute, it was a knife, and the tune it played was death.
Sue wanted to jump up on the bridge rail and shout all this out to the complacent holidaymakers heading for the beach or the amusement arcades. They would shove their coins into slots, listen to
the bingo caller, or sit on the beach in the sun on striped deck-chairs, newspapers shielding their faces, edging back every so often as the tide came in closer. Then, late in the afternoon, they
would go to one of the many fish and chip restaurants and eat.
None of them knew about the man with the oily smell of fish on his fingers – probably the last thing his victims smelled – the Ancient Mariner eyes and the raspy voice. She wanted to
tell them all about Greg Eastcote and the atrocities he had committed against women, all about the blood, the pain, the utter degradation and humiliation, and the way she had been imperfectly sewn
back together again. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men . . . That man there, the balding one with the crying toddler in his arms, she wanted to assure him that she was here
to restore the balance. But she wasn’t crazy; she knew she couldn’t say anything. Instead she just watched the people passing back and forth over the bridge for a while, wondering
whether they were truly innocent or just indifferent, then she went to find a quiet pub.
She soon found a place on Baxtergate. Three bored-looking punks with green and yellow hair sat in the lounge playing the jukebox, but through a corridor by the side of the bar, separated from
the lounge by swing doors, was a much quieter room, all dark varnished panels, hard chairs and benches. Sue realized that not only hadn’t she looked at the papers yet, she hadn’t even
eaten since her meagre and greasy breakfast at Mrs Cummings’s. The tea was so bad at Rose’s that she hadn’t felt inclined to find out what the food was like. All the pub served
was cold snacks, so she ordered a crab sandwich and a half of lager and lime.
When she had eaten, she sat back with her drink and lit a cigarette, turning to the local paper first to see if there was any news of Keith. A brief report told her that police were continuing
their inquiries into the suspicious death of Jack Grimley and the ‘brutal assault’ on a young Australian tourist, who was still in a critical condition at St Mary’s Hospital,
Scarborough. Apparently, Keith had not yet regained consciousness.
Then, under the heading HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? she suddenly noticed an artist’s impression of her. She hadn’t spotted it at first because it looked nothing like her. Perhaps there
was a faint resemblance to Martha Browne, but even that would be pushing it a bit. The shape of the head was all wrong, far too round, and the eyes were too close together, the lips too thick.
Still, it was enough to make her pulse race. It meant they were on the right track and they were getting closer. All the caption said was that police were anxious to talk to this girl, who had been
seen with the Australian in Hinderwell, as she ‘may have been the last person to see him before the attack.’
Sue folded the paper and turned to the crossword, but she found herself too preoccupied to concentrate on the clues. She knew that the police in general told little of what they knew to the
papers. If she read between the lines, it seemed likely that they had also found the bus driver who had picked her up near Staithes. But all he could tell them was that she had got off at Whitby
bus station. After that, Martha Browne had disappeared for ever.
Could they also track her to the lodgings on Abbey Terrace? Certainly if they traced Keith’s movements, as they would surely be doing, then the odds were that they would check the register
there, get a better description of her from the owner or his wife, and mount a full-scale search for ‘Martha Browne’. Why, she wondered, were they taking so long? They must have found
out where Keith had been staying in Staithes quickly enough. From there, it surely wouldn’t have taken them long to work their way back to Whitby, unless there was no evidence among his
belongings to say where he’d been – no journal, no brochures, no postcards unsent. What if they did know and every policeman in Whitby was on the lookout for her already? Nervously, she
glanced over at a young couple by the bar, but they were only interested in one another.
Still, she told herself, she had no real cause to worry. Martha Browne no longer existed. She could have gone anywhere from Whitby bus station – Scarborough, York, Leeds – and why
not on to London, Paris or Rome? Surely nobody would expect her to hang around in the area after she had attacked Keith McLaren? Even if they did know who they were after, they wouldn’t
centre their search in Whitby. She had told Keith that she came from Exeter, but she couldn’t remember what she had written, if anything, in the register at the guesthouse. She wondered how
long it would take the police to discover that Martha Browne had never existed in the first place. And what would they do then?
Of course, she knew that all this was nothing but speculation. Even if they could link her to Keith via Abbey Terrace, the Lucky Fisherman and Hinderwell, they still couldn’t prove that
she had done anything wrong. She could say that Keith had wanted to lead her into the woods but she had refused and left him, taking the bus back to Whitby. It probably wouldn’t come to that,
but if it did, she knew they couldn’t prove anything. If the worst came to the worst, she could say he had tried to rape her and she had defended herself, then got scared and run away.
The only real problem was that it would look very odd indeed if they found her and discovered that Martha Browne and Sue Bridehead were the same person, and what’s more, that she was
really Kirsten, the only surviving victim of the Student Slasher. That would certainly look incriminating, especially when they found his body. But would it be enough to convict her of anything?
Perhaps. Still, she had known from the start that the whole business was fraught with risks, though she hadn’t expected it to turn into such a mess.