Authors: Peter Robinson
Just then, she heard a door bang downstairs, followed by the clamour of children’s voices. Jason called out her name. Paula told him to be quiet. Time to enter into family life again.
Sarah’s heart leapt into her throat. She had never felt so nervous, even before going on stage for a first night. She looked at the letter again and dropped it back among the pile of clothes, half pleased that she had been interrupted before opening it. After all, she was in England now, thousands of miles away from her problems in LA.
She pulled on her jeans and sweatshirt, then opened the door and started down the worn stone stairs.
What she saw made her stop halfway.
Illuminated by the hall light, a man slumped in a wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs. Beside him, attached to the chair, stood a small tank, like the kind frogmen wear, from which a transparent tube ran to his nostrils. His shoulders sloped and his body looked emaciated under the thick woollen blanket. Bluish flesh sagged and wrinkled over hollow, bony cheeks and scared, bright, feverish eyes looked up at her. Even from halfway upstairs, she could hear the soft hiss of the oxygen and the struggle as he laboured for breath.
White-knuckled, she gripped the banister and took a faltering step forward. ‘Hello, Father,’ she said.
13
‘I hear your actress found a body on the beach,’ Maria said. ‘Think there’s anything in it?’
Arvo shook his head. ‘I doubt it. Just unlucky, I guess. On the other hand . . .’
‘What?’
‘I don’t like coincidences, that’s all.’
‘So what’s she like?’
‘Who?’
‘You know. The actress. Sarah Broughton.’
‘You watch that show?’
‘Sure do.’
Arvo shook his head slowly. It was late Friday afternoon, and Maria was sitting opposite him. He hadn’t seen her since the Sandi Gaines intervention. The only other team members in the office were Eric Mettering and Kelly Norris, one of the three females on the unit.
‘Me, too,’ Kelly called out from the far hutch. ‘That Jack Marillo guy’s got a great bod.’
Maria laughed. ‘So tell me about her,’ she insisted. ‘What’s she like? In the flesh?’
In the flesh, Arvo still thought that Maria herself was as desirable a woman as he had ever met, though he hadn’t told her that, and just about the opposite physical type to Sarah Broughton.
They were different as day and night. Maria’s sexuality was sensual and earthy, while Sarah Broughton’s was more cerebral. While lovemaking with Maria would be joyous and uncomplicated, Arvo imagined, with Sarah it would mean searching for and freeing repressed emotions, finding ways through barriers and other defences. Maria’s skin would be warm, would offer friction and texture to the touch, he thought, whereas Sarah’s would be as smooth, and possibly as cold, as marble.
‘What kind of question is that?’ Arvo asked. ‘“What’s she like?”’
‘A pretty simple one, I’d’ve thought,’ said Maria. ‘Is she pretty?’
‘Of course she’s pretty. She’s a TV actress.’
‘They’re not all pretty,’ Maria countered. ‘Especially the Brits. Some of them are downright plain and homely.’
‘They’ve all got crooked teeth,’ Kelly chimed in.
‘Okay, so her teeth
are
a bit crooked,’ Arvo said. ‘So what? So are mine. Does it mean you can’t be pretty if you’ve got crooked teeth?’
‘You think you’re pretty, Arvo?’ Maria asked with a mischievous smile.
‘That’s not what I said. You’re misinterpreting me. What I said was—’
‘I know what you said. So you think
she’s
pretty?’
‘Sure she’s pretty, in a cool sort of way.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You know, she’s blonde, pale complexion, has that accent.’
‘You think she’s frigid, is that it?’
‘No, I didn’t say that. Look—’
‘So she’s sexy as well as pretty?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Guess so? Come on, Arvo, you can do better than that.’
‘Okay. Yeah. She’s sexy. All right?’
‘How sexy?’
‘Just sexy.’
‘No need to blush.’
‘I’m not blushing.’
‘Yes you are,’ yelled Kelly.
‘What about her personality?’ Maria asked.
‘General impressions?’
‘Well you hardly know her intimately. Or do you?’
‘She’s an actress. You know actresses. She was partly in character. The cop she plays.’
‘Anita O’Rourke,’ Kelly chipped in again.
‘That’s the one.’
‘So,’ Maria went on, ‘you’re saying you didn’t get a real good sense of her?’
‘She’s very reserved.’
‘Sounds like a typical Brit.’
‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘But I think she’s scared, too.’
‘Maybe she’s got good reason to be. What’s your sense of the guy who’s writing the letters?’
Arvo thought for a moment, recalling the letter he had been studying earlier. ‘He sees himself as her long-lost lover, now become her saviour, her rescuer, her knight in shining armour.’
‘Rescuer from what?’
‘From the evils of Hollywood. From
Them
.’
‘The usual semi-literate diatribe?’
‘Not really. This guy seems reasonably well educated. Not that that means a lot, I know. Bizarre forms of spelling and grammar hardly represent a greater threat than correct grammar – except to literacy. There are some unusual capitalizations – nouns like “Machines,” “Power” and “Crazy.”’
‘Germans capitalize their nouns, don’t they?’ said Maria.
‘Uh-huh. But this seems more like some sort of mental tic. It makes the concepts sound
Big,
and it goes with his gushing, flowery prose style.’
‘What about the handwriting?’ Kelly Norris asked. She had left her own hutch and was now standing beside Maria, interested, hand resting lightly on the divider. A tall, big-boned woman with a mass of curly grey hair and spots of colour high on her cheeks, Kelly had been the first woman on the team. She was wearing threadbare black cords and a baggy white cardigan over a red blouse. Kelly always did dress casually.
‘It was done on a laser printer,’ said Arvo. ‘That means he either owns a computer set-up or he works in a place where he can get access to one.’
‘Where did he send the letters?’ Maria asked.
‘Home address. She thought she kept it a pretty closely guarded secret.’
Kelly and Maria laughed. ‘Her and everyone else.’
‘Yeah. Well, maybe we can do a bit of checking around with the agencies and private detectives who sell that sort of information. See if anyone’s bought Sarah Broughton’s address recently.’
‘Good luck,’ said Maria. ‘In my experience, those guys give you dick.’
‘True enough. Still worth a shot.’
‘Any occult stuff?’ Kelly asked.
‘No,’ said Arvo. Often, the writers insisted that the victim should be initiated as a Dawn Goddess of the Order of the Golden Monkey Foreskins, or something. Arvo had seen plenty of those, and they always gave him the same feeling: somewhere between the creeps and the desire to laugh out loud.
‘Apart from the romantic stuff,’ he went on, ‘there are a few disturbing references to hacking away the corrupt flesh. And a bit about biting through her nipple and luxuriating in the flow of blood and milk.’
‘Sick-o,’ said Kelly.
Maria put her finger in her mouth and mimicked barfing.
Even Eric looked up from the file he was working on and wrinkled his nose.
‘The big three,’ Arvo said. ‘Sex, death and Mother. All in one sentence. All very mysterious.’ But he stopped himself from reading too much into the images. After all, he wasn’t a psychiatrist; he only had a degree in Communications, that catch-all for people who didn’t really know what they wanted to do when they were between eighteen and twenty-one. And the TMU didn’t demand special prerequisite training from its members, only that they be good detectives. Keen intuition, strong research abilities and general social skills were the essentials.
He shook his head. ‘And Sarah Broughton’s a puzzle, too. I think she knows more than she’s telling.’
Maria raised her black eyebrows. ‘Better watch yourself, Arvo,’ she said. ‘I’ve never known a man who wasn’t a sucker for an enigmatic woman.’ She nudged Kelly and they both laughed. Eric kept his head down, shiny bald pate towards them.
‘Package for Detective Arvo Hughes!’
Arvo raised his hand and the patrolman walked right up to his hutch and handed over a thick manila envelope. He signed for it, stuck his thumb under the flap and ripped it open.
Crime-scene pictures spilled out over his messy desk. Jesus, he thought, as he looked at the stark black-and-white images and the garish colour Polaroids, someone had certainly done a number on John Heimar.
There were pictures of the general area and of the body half buried,
in situ,
with the bloody stump of an arm lying beside it, where, Arvo assumed, Sarah Broughton must have dropped it. Then there were photos of the various body parts as they were unearthed and pieced together on a canvas sheet on the beach. Photo after photo showed the reconstruction of a body: first the arm, then the arm and head, then an arm, a leg and the head, and so on.
There was very little blood; clearly most of it had been spilled somewhere else and the rest had drained into the sand. The rough edges of flesh where the head and legs had been severed gaped like cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop.
Arvo became aware of Maria’s perfume and felt her warm breath on his neck as she came around and leaned over him. ‘My God,’ he heard her mutter. ‘This is what your actress found?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘The poor woman.’
But Arvo wasn’t looking at the images of violent death any longer. Something in one of the early black-and-whites had caught his eye.
The photograph had been taken from the landward side of the body, and judging by the angle, the photographer had probably knelt to take it. The time must have been soon after sunrise, because the sun was shining over the hills in the east and casting fairly long shadows.
Just beyond the body, where the sand was getting wet from the tide, Arvo thought he could make out a faint indentation, as if something had been drawn there, then mostly washed away. He could only see it because of the sun’s angle, and even then it was no more than an indistinct outline. It could have been merely a trick of the light and water, he thought, but it looked exactly like a heart shape.
14
As soon as Sarah got to the bottom of the stairs and bent to give her father a kiss on his rough cheek, Cathy and Jason dashed through from the front room and surrounded her, jumping up and down. She had hardly registered the sour smell of his breath before the kids had dragged her away to tell them all about the television series and what it was like living with all the stars in Hollywood. What were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme
really
like?
After she had whetted their appetites with a few harmless exaggerations, magically transforming the humble beach house into something approaching the Hearst castle, she went to look for Paula and found her in the kitchen, warm in the heat of the gas oven.
‘It’s nowt special,’ Paula said, by way of a warning. ‘Just a chicken-and-leek casserole, boiled potatoes and a tin of peas. Not what you’re used to over there, I expect.’
‘It’s fine, really,’ said Sarah, smiling to herself. In a way it was a relief not to have to make her way politely through yet another shredded romaine and sweet onion salad with chèvre and roasted chestnuts, or duck and spinach ravioli with thymed tomatoes. ‘Can I help?’
Paula gestured with a wooden spoon. ‘You can peel those spuds, if you like.’
Put firmly in her place, Sarah began to peel the potatoes. ‘Dad looks worse than I expected,’ she said.
Paula gave a harsh laugh. ‘Well, he’s not getting any better, that’s for certain. But there’s good days and bad. Today’s fair to middling.’ She put down her wooden spoon and turned to face Sarah, tiredness and resignation showing in the lines around her eyes and the dark bags beneath them. ‘It’s the nights that are the worst,’ she said. ‘He has trouble breathing when he lies down sometimes. The doctor says it’s normal, given his condition, but that doesn’t help a lot, does it? The thing is, Sal, he gets so frightened when it happens. He thinks his time’s come. His heart beats so fast and loud I’ll swear they can almost hear it in the next street. And he gets confused, he doesn’t know where he is or who I am. It passes, like, but it gets me worried. I hate to see him like that. And him such a vigorous man in his prime.’
She looked away, eyes burning, then shot Sarah a sly, sideways glance before casting her eyes down. ‘He calls me by your name sometimes, too, you know. “Sal,” he says. “Sal, I’ve got to go now.”’ She sniffed and went back to stirring the sauce. ‘Hurry up with those spuds, will you, or this bloody casserole will be well past its sell-by date.’
‘It smells good,’ said Sarah, flushed and tingling with what Paula had just told her. Her father had called
her
name – Sal – in his confusion. Perhaps he didn’t hate her, after all. She ran cold water into the pan of peeled potatoes and put it on the ring.