Authors: Peter Robinson
There was also a chance that the police might find out about the wig and clothes she had bought in Scarborough, but that was very unlikely. She had purposely chosen large, busy department
stores, and none of the shop assistants had paid her very much attention. Since she had been in, they would have served hundreds of other customers. Then she remembered the scrawny woman with the
large head, the smoker she had startled in the ladies’ toilet. She might remember. But so what? All she knew was that Sue had gone to the toilet in a Scarborough department store. Nothing
unusual in that. There had been another woman who had spoken to her too that day. She remembered putting on make-up next to a woman who joked about her husband saying she always took so long to go
to the toilet. But none of it mattered. She had spoken to lots of people during her time in Whitby, as anybody would.
No, there was nothing to worry about. Besides, she had divine protection, at least until she had fulfilled her destiny. Her spirit guides would hardly allow her to fail after she had got so far.
Nonetheless, it was wise to be cautious, get it done quickly and leave town. There was no sense in jeopardizing the main reason for her visit just for the pleasure of toying with her prey a bit
longer and watching Greg Eastcote grow more paranoid day by day. She wasn’t in this for cruelty, for pleasure. Besides, he would be growing more and more cautious. Best get it done tonight,
then, if she could.
The Student Slasher seemed to have disappeared completely from the pages of the
Independent,
as Sue had suspected he soon would. And he wouldn’t appear there alive again. With luck,
when she had killed him, the police would search his house and find the seven locks of hair. They would check the dates and places of his overnight deliveries, and they would find out who he was
and what he had done. Also with luck, they would probably assume that a victim had got the better of him this time, and they wouldn’t employ all their resources trying to find out exactly who
she was.
After lunch, Sue returned to the factory area. Eastcote could be on a short local run and might come back at any time. She watched from the woods, lying on her stomach, then at evening
opening-time she went to the Merry Monk and took her usual table by the window. By pulling back the curtain just a little when nobody was looking, she could see straight down the convex slope of
waste ground to Eastcote’s cottage. She would wait for him to come home, then she would somehow lure him away. He hadn’t struck in his own town before, perhaps due to caution, but this
time he wouldn’t be able to resist.
Shortly after seven, Sue saw him arrive home. The lights went on behind the pale blue curtains in the cottage. Uncertain how to draw him out, she finished her drink and left the pub. Instead of
returning to the lane, walking downhill and turning right onto Eastcote’s street, she walked straight across the waste ground, from where she could easily be seen. Sunset was almost over now,
and the western sky glowed in even striations of deep violet, scarlet and purple. A jet’s trail snaked right across the western horizon, losing shape quickly, and one or two clouds blushed in
the last light. Nettles and thistles stung Sue’s legs as she brushed her way through the weeds, but the pain felt distant, unreal.
She could knock on his door, or telephone perhaps. But she hadn’t seen a phone when she had been inside his house. Knocking on the door was too risky. He might react quickly and drag her
inside. Instead, she just walked slowly down to the street and paused when she got to the end of the low garden wall. The curtains were still drawn. She thought she could see a shadow move behind
them. She stood for a few moments, certain that they were looking at one another with only the thin blue curtains between them, then moved on, taking the dirt path across the scrub land that led
down to the main road. As she walked, she felt a strange drifting sensation, as if she was floating an inch or two above the grass.
Sue stopped and just stood there, about a hundred yards from his house. It was uncanny, the certainty she felt that he had been aware of her standing outside his cottage and that he would open
his door and look. And he did. She stood there in the middle of a piece of waste land, nettles, weeds and thistles all around, silhouetted by the sunset. He walked to the end of his garden path,
turned his head in her direction, and slowly opened the gate.
KIRSTEN
Kirsten stared out of the window at the landscape beyond her reflection. The rounded green hills of the Cotswolds soon gave way to the fertile Vale of Evesham, where barley and
wheat looked ready for harvest in the fields, and apples, pears and plums hung heavy on their trees in the hillside orchards.
Then came the built-up landscape of the Midlands: cooling towers, the sprawling monotony of council estates, allotments, greenhouses, a red-brick school, a football field with white goal posts.
When the train crept into Birmingham and she could feel the huge city pressing in on all sides, she began to feel nervous. This was, after all, her longest journey in ages, and she was making it
alone. For over a year she had been living in a soft, comfortable, familiar world, shuttling between the Georgian elegance of Bath and the bucolic indifference of Brierley Coombe.
Now it was grey and raining and she was in Birmingham, a big, rough city with slums, skinheads, race riots and all the rest. Luckily, she didn’t have to get off the train there. She hoped
Sarah would be at the station to meet her when she arrived at her destination.
After a twenty-minute stop, the train pulled out and lumbered past twisting concrete overpasses into another built-up area: the derelict warehouses with rusty zigzag fire escapes, and the messy
factory yards stacked high with crates and pallets that always seemed to back onto train tracks in cities. It ran alongside a busy commuter road, a dirty brown canal, and a dark brick embankment
wall scrawled with graffiti. Next came a few green fields with grazing cows, and then the train settled into a steady, lulling clickety-click through Derbyshire into South Yorkshire, with its slag
heaps and idle pit wheels, a landscape in which all the green seemed to have been smudged by an inky finger that was now running in the rain.
Kirsten closed her eyes and let the rhythm carry her. She would stay with Sarah for a day or two perhaps, until she felt it was time to go. Despite what she had told her parents, she had not
suggested that Sarah take time off work. Kirsten would say she was going to the Dales walking for a few days alone. If that sounded odd – after all, she
had
spent the last year in the
countryside, much of the time alone – then it was too bad. But Sarah would take her word. It was surprising how eager people were to believe her about anything after what had happened to
her.
The rain had stopped when Sarah met her at the station later that evening. They allowed themselves the luxury of a taxi to take them back to the bedsit. All the way, Sarah chatted about how glad
she was that Kirsten had decided to come back, and how they would look for a flat together as soon as Kirsten had got her bearings again. Kirsten listened and made the right responses, glancing
left and right out of the window like a nervous bird as familiar sights unfolded around her: the tall, white university tower, the terraces of sooty red-brick student housing, the park. Washed and
glistening after the rain, it all took her breath away with its combination of familiarity and strangeness. For fifteen months it had been simply a landscape of the mind, a closed-off world in
which certain things had happened and been filed away. Now that she was actually riding through it again in a taxi, she felt as if she had somehow drawn her surroundings from deep inside herself,
from her imagination. She was no longer in the real world at all; she was in a painting, an imagined landscape.
It was getting dark outside when they arrived at the flat. Kirsten followed Sarah up the stairs, remembering with her body rather than in her mind how often she had made this journey before. Her
feet remembered in their cells the cracked linoleum they trod, and her fingertips seemed to hold within them the memory of the light switch she pressed.
When she entered her room itself, she had that sensation, however mistaken, of being at a journey’s end. It was something she had felt so often before, arriving home after lectures or
tiring exams. She remembered the occasional day spent ill in bed with a cold or a sore throat, when she would read and watch the shadows of the houses opposite slowly crawl up the far wall and over
the ceiling until the room grew so dark that she had to put the reading lamp on.
She dropped her holdall in the corner and looked around. Some of her belongings were still in their original places: a few books and cassettes in the main room and mugs and jars in the little
kitchen alcove. All Sarah had done was clear space for her own things. There was no problem with clothes, of course, as Kirsten had emptied the cupboard of most of hers, but Sarah had filled one
cardboard box with some of Kirsten’s books and papers to make room for her own on the shelves and the desk.
‘Well?’ Sarah said, watching her. ‘Not changed much, has it?’
‘No, it hasn’t. I’m surprised.’
‘Does it upset you, being back here again?’
‘No,’ said Kirsten. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure. It’s just a very odd feeling, hard to explain.’
‘Well, don’t worry about it. Just sit down for now. Do you want some tea? Or there’s wine. I got a bottle of plonk. Thought you might like that better than going out on the
first night.’
‘Yes, that’s great. I don’t much fancy going out. I’m a bit tired and shaky. But some wine would be nice.’
Sarah took the bottle from the small refrigerator and held it up. It was a pale gold colour. ‘Aussie stuff,’ she said. ‘A Chardonnay. Supposed to be good.’ She picked up
two glasses from the dishrack and searched for the corkscrew in the kitchen drawer. Finally, everything in hand, she filled their glasses and brought them through. ‘Cheese? I’ve got a
wedge of Brie and some Wensleydale.’
‘Yes, please.’
Sarah brought in the cheese with a selection of biscuits on a Tetley’s tray, liberated from the Ring O’Bells. They toasted the future and drank. Kirsten helped herself to some food,
then picked up a book she noticed lying on the floor by the armchair. It was a thick biography of Thomas Hardy. ‘Is this what you’re reading right now?’ she asked.
Sarah nodded. ‘I’m thinking about doing my PhD in Victorian fiction, and you know how I love biographies. It seemed a pleasurable enough way of getting back into academic
gear.’
And is it? I mean, Hardy’s hardly a light, cheerful read, is he?’
Sarah laughed. ‘I don’t know about a pessimist, but he was certainly a bloody pervert.’
‘How?’ asked Kirsten. ‘I’ve only read
Far from the Madding Crowd
for that novel course in first year. I don’t even remember much about that except some
soldier showing off his fancy sword-play. I suppose that was meant to be phallic?’
Sarah laughed. ‘Yes, but that’s not what I meant. All writers do that kind of symbolism thing to some extent, don’t they?’
‘What
do
you mean?’
‘Well, for one thing,’ Sarah went on, ‘do you know he used to like attending public executions when he was in his teens? Especially when women were being hanged.’ She
reached for the book and turned the pages slowly as she talked. ‘There was one in Dorchester and he told someone about it when he was much older . . . ah, here it is . . . 1856. Martha Browne
was the woman’s name, and she was hanged for murdering her husband. She caught him with another woman and they got into a fight. He attacked her with a whip and she stabbed him. Hanging her
was the Victorians’ idea of justice. Anyway, Hardy went along and wrote about it.’ She pushed the book under Kirsten’s nose. ‘Just look at that.’
Kirsten read: ‘What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and
back.’
‘I mean, really,’ Sarah went on, ‘the poor woman was swinging at the end of a bloody rope and Hardy makes out as if she was entering some kind of wet T-shirt contest. Would you
credit it?’
Kirsten read over the description; it was certainly tinged with eroticism.
‘Am I right?’ Sarah asked, pouring more wine. ‘Don’t you get the feeling that Hardy got some kind of kinky sexual pleasure from watching the woman get snuffed?’ She
put a hand to her mouth quickly. ‘Oh. I’m sorry, love. I . . . I put my foot in it. Must be the wine going to my head. I mean, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to . . . you
know.’
Kirsten waved her hand. ‘It’s all right. I’d rather you say what you like than walk around handling me with kid gloves. I can take it. And anyway, you’re right, it
is
sexual.’
‘Yes. And what’s more, did you notice how he turns her into some sort of convenient image for a poem. As if her life was only important because he got a charge from watching her get
hanged. She wasn’t even a person, an individual, to him.’
‘I wonder what she was like,’ Kirsten said abstractedly.
‘We’ll never know, will we?’
‘I suppose not. But it’s not as odd as all that, is it? The way Hardy uses her, I mean. We all tend to see other people as bit players in our own dramas, don’t we? I mean
we’re all self-centred.’
‘I don’t think so. Not to that extent.’
‘Maybe not. But you might be surprised.’ She held her glass out and Sarah emptied the bottle. Kirsten was beginning to feel a little tipsy. After the journey and the disorienting
effect of coming back to her old room, the wine was affecting her more than it usually would. Still, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She helped herself to another chunk of Wensleydale.
Sarah shook the wine bottle, grinned and jumped up, ruffling Kirsten’s short hair as she passed by. ‘Fear not,’ she said. ‘I suspected we might need more than the usual
amount of alcoholic sustenance. How about some music? All right?’