I could not have said that I looked well; I was pale, and my eyes were bloodshot and bright with fever. I am not the kind of man who looks at all attractive when he is unshaven; I simply looked dirty, and the scratch down my face was an ugly weal, beaded with pus. The bruises on my throat were visible now as fingerprints: four roundish points, each with a crescent of broken skin where the nail had penetrated the flesh, and on the other side of the throat, below the jugular vein, a broader, less defined bruise where the thumb had been. A little way above that was an incision I had not previously noticed, a crescent-shaped wound, some three inches long, slightly raised. I frowned at myself in the mirror. That was not the mark of fingernails, nor had it been accidental. It had been deliberately placed. But why? And how? By the size and shape of the mark, the slight irregularity of the incision, it almost looked like the mark of – I shook my aching head irritably. I had had too many nightmares. What possible reason would anyone have? And yet, they did look very like the marks of teeth. Angry with myself and my fancies, I deliberately turned away. Those scratches would have to be disinfected, otherwise I would have more than bad dreams to worry about. I found a bottle of iodine, and, standing in front of the mirror, dabbed at my face and neck until all the cuts and scratches were covered. That was better. Now for something to eat, for I still felt weak and dizzy, and I realized that I had eaten nothing since the previous morning. I went to my room to change, and stopped as I noticed a screw of paper tacked to my door. I had been in such a hurry that I had not seen it before, and I took it (correctly, as it happened) to be a note from Mrs Brown.
Dear Mr Daniel,
I have had to Pop out for a While to Visit my Sister, I will be Back this Evening. I am Sorry you are not Yourself today. Should you be Wanting a Bite to eat I have left a Pot of Tea on the Hob and a Nice Piece of Cod in the Oven for your Supper. And help Yourself to Anything in the Larder.
Yours Sincerely,
V. Brown
I smiled. That meant I had the house to myself for the evening, and I was glad of it; I would have no awkward questions to answer, for Mrs Brown was as protective as she was good-hearted, and I sometimes found her affection rather overpowering. I did not bother to dress, knowing that I was alone in the house, and I made my way down to the kitchen. There was food left for me in the oven, as promised, and tea on the hob, and I settled myself down at the kitchen table to eat. I had hardly eaten more than a mouthful, however, before the sickness came upon me again; my head swam, my stomach roiled, and I pushed the plate away unfinished. I drank two glasses of water in rapid succession, fighting off nausea, and remained for a few moments in front of the fire, shivering with fever. The events of the previous night had taken more from me than I had suspected. I reached my hands towards the fire, and began for the first time since the beginning of my nightmare to review the situation logically. I prided myself on being a logical man, a man of learning, and my natural pragmatism had begun, with the help of a bath and a long sleep, to return to me. This I must emphasize; I was not neurotic, nor am I yet; all conclusions I have since reached are based on my own experiences and research. Even then, dragging myself from a vortex of horrors, I began to view the situation objectively.
My first thought was a profound gratitude at being alive at all. I had obviously witnessed something which incriminated Rosemary and her band of murderers to the hilt; they had tried to be rid of me, and in some way had bungled it. Perhaps they had intended me to be accused of the crime; perhaps after having tried to throttle and drug me, they had abandoned me for dead. It was clearly a police matter, as much for my own sake as for Robert’s (I refused to believe that he had in any way been involved in the affair), and I racked my brains for the best way to handle the situation.
By now, the murderers would have disposed of the evidence; the body, I knew, was hidden in the churchyard, and would no doubt be found sooner or later. Rosemary, in her apartment, would be unassailable. Rafe and Java … they were my only chance of being believed, and I had no idea of who they were or where to find them. I myself – well, there was no doubt that even as a police informant I might be suspect; I had already been strategically placed to discover one corpse, and the circumstances in which I had found myself this time might easily be seen to be suspicious. I shrank from placing myself in a situation where it would be Rosemary’s word against my own … where would it end?
My head had begun to ache again with the effort of concentrating. I knew that this was by no means the first violent death to hit Cambridge in the past few months. Could Rosemary somehow be implicated in the death of the woman in the weir? Or was my evidence circumstantial, and Rosemary innocent?
I wanted to believe it. Remembering her face, the sweetness of her features, the innocence which shone through her eyes, I wanted it, for I loved her, have maybe never ceased to love her, and I wanted to believe it with all my heart. My brain began to formulate wild and attractive hypotheses. She was innocent: a pawn of Java and Rafe, somehow in their power. They had hypnotized her. They had drugged her, too. They were somehow blackmailing her. From my earlier suspicion and horror of her, my delusions led me to believe that she was the persecuted one, that she needed my help, that my fearsome nightmares were only the product of jealousy and the trauma of what I had seen the previous night. I told you, Rosemary made children of all of us.
Contact the police? I dared not, as much for fear of incriminating Rosemary as myself; could I expect them to fail to suspect her? The newspapers had by now revealed that Scotland Yard had been called in to investigate the ‘Body in the Weir’ case; I expected to be contacted for questioning again at any time. The last thing I wanted was to draw the attention of the investigators towards myself, or towards Rosemary. I saw that I would have to act on my own, and as quickly as possible. I went back to my room, dressed in a plain, dark suit, a light overcoat and my hat, returned to the kitchen, and lingered over the drawer of knives. Finally I chose a small carving-knife, sharp, but small enough to hide in my sleeve, and set off out, feeling slightly ridiculous, but excited too. I suppose that for a man of action, to set out into the night with murder on his mind and a lady for the rescuing would have been no great thing; but I was no man of action.
My watch told me it was close on eight o’clock; the day had been hot, and had given way to a sultry, cloudy evening. I was still shivering, however, and glad of my overcoat, though most of the people I encountered were more lightly dressed than I was. My step was purposeful, my left arm stiff from the pressure of the knife; I knew where I was going. Where? To her apartment, of course, but in stealth, this time, forewarned and careful. I had walked about half the way to the town centre when the first cramps hit me; one moment they were sudden but bearable, like a stitch in my side, the next they had me doubled up beside the road, almost on my knees, cold sweat running down my face, my jaw locked in agony. The road was not a busy one; no one came to help me. I sank to my knees by the roadside, hardly even able to breathe, to wait it out. A breath, drawn out an eternity-long, acid in my belly, my lungs … another breath. The pain ebbed, ceased. Carefully, I stood up, afraid to move too quickly lest the pain came on again. I straightened, took several deep breaths.
Satisfied that the cramps, whatever had caused them, were indeed over, I began to walk again, with more care, down the deserted road. I had hardly gone more than a hundred yards, however, when the cramps hit me once more, flooring me immediately this time, paralysing. The world spun around me like a carnival ride, I retched agonizingly, spat blackness on to the road. Maybe I cried out; maybe I imagined it. My glasses slipped on to the grass, I fumbled for them, touched only grass, tried to stand, slipped, fell to my side. I think I suspected I was having a heart attack, and with both hands clasped to my chest I managed to crawl on to the road, where a street-lamp threw uncertain fragments of light in an ellipse around me. Then, I fainted.
When I regained consciousness (not, I believe, more than a few minutes after), the pain was gone, and the street
was still deserted. I stood up carefully, felt no hint of a cramp, straightened up to my full height. I brushed my clothes, feeling rather foolish now that my malaise was over. I was inclined to disbelieve the whole thing and put it down to my lack of food, or perhaps the after-effects of whatever poison they had injected into me, for now I felt quite recovered, indeed, I had the beginnings of a healthy appetite. I found my glasses, wiped them and put them on, immediately feeling better. I brushed my hat, replaced it on my head and set off on my way again, feeling distinctly hungry now, and wondering whether I should not stop somewhere on the way to Rosemary’s apartment for a bite to eat. It would not do for me to pass out while I was there. A group of students, strangers to me, passed me as I joined the main road into Cambridge; I caught the sound of laughter as they went by, a merry call of: ‘Good evening!’
Maybe they had surprised me; I started as I heard the voice and my steps wavered again. I was suddenly, acutely conscious of the cold, of the sickness in the pit of my stomach. I felt dizzy once more, raised my hand to touch the brim of my hat in greeting, and paused in mid-gesture, my smile faltering on my lips. The hunger was suddenly very acute. They passed me, still chattering; only one young fellow looked at me askance as he went by, wondering, perhaps, if I were drunk. He was the closest to me of the group; the lamplight reflecting from his broad, ruddy face as he loomed out at me from the darkness. For an instant, my sense of perspective was distorted; his young face seemed to rush towards mine like something grotesque seen through a fishbowl, and I backed away; his vapid blue eyes, his broad laughing mouth, the beads of sweat in the enlarged pores of his shaven cheeks horribly magnified in my mind’s eye. The sudden heat of him was overwhelming; I could smell him, ripe as a parcel of meat in the night, the scent of his hair-cream only an accompaniment to the primal throb of his young blood. Before I knew it, I had reached out a hand to touch him … but the party was gone, laughing into the night, and I was left to stand beneath the lamp-post, shaking and appalled at my thoughts. Surely, I had not been thinking …? I cursed under my breath and went on my way. My experiences of the past twenty-four hours were giving me delusions. I walked on, and the hunger stalked me, whetted, as I resumed the hunt.
Two
ALICE PAINTED SWIFTLY, precisely, thinking over the facts as she had read them in Daniel Holmes’s journal.
The facts. They loomed overhead like apocalyptic birds, spiralling out of the dim past with their message of destruction. It was tempting to go beyond the facts, to imagine all kinds of rare and disturbing things, but Alice frowned at her canvas, her deft fingers handling airbrush and paintbrush and masking gum and thinner as her mind went over and over what she had read in compelling, primal rhythms of thought.
She painted absently, unconsciously, her hands moving deftly and quickly, her mind elsewhere. She supposed that she had planned what she was going to do; had made preliminary sketches, had mixed paints and wiped brushes, but hours later as she looked at the canvas, she saw it with the eyes of a stranger. It was not that she had not looked at it before, but as she had been working on it, she had only ever seen details: a hand here, a patch of vegetation, a square of sky; she had seen only effects of pigment and form. Now she saw a work of art, utterly individual, compelling her to look at it. She took a step backwards, looked calmly at the canvas for a long time, and listened to the deceptive beating of her heart as everything swung slowly into place with the inevitability of a pendulum.
A riverside scene again, perhaps even the same place: Alice recognized the little twist in the river-bank, the overhanging vegetation, the pale reflections of the trees in the dark water. Again, everything was rendered in painstaking detail, somehow clearer than reality, cleaner in shape and with its own lambency. Two figures stood in the foreground, one facing Alice on the far side of the river-bank, though with his face turned down towards the water, the other seen in profile, standing up to his knees in the river, trousers rolled up to reveal thin, pallid legs, comically foreshortened by the refraction of the light from the river’s surface.
Both were young men, dressed rather formally in suits with broad lapels; the one with the glasses, facing Alice, was wearing a hat. Alice could not quite read their expressions, but there was something in the way both of them were standing, something strained, as if by curiosity, but at the same time holding back from the object which floated between them in the river. Alice squinted to see it, then as she realized what she had painted, she gave an involuntary grimace. God! What on earth had possessed her?
The canvas was small; the figure should have been mercifully indistinct, but was not. On the contrary, as she approached it, it seemed to move sharply into focus, so that she saw it in far more detail than she would have liked. It was partly submerged; she could distinguish its pallid bulk just below the surface, resting bonelessly on the greenish water; could imagine the lazy movement of the ripples around it. But she could see its face, turned towards her, saw it and recognized it, despite the discoloration and the bloating, recognized the mass of red hair which pooled around it; and as she peered closer, Alice thought (no, she knew) she saw the expression on that ruined face. The eyes piggy with swelling, the mouth open to reveal a black hole framed with yellow and carnivorous teeth … the expression was triumph, morbidly out of place on the face of that corpse, no, not even triumph; it was rapture.
Alice was mesmerized; it seemed that the closer she looked, the more detail she saw; she imagined every twig, every blade of grass to contain infinities of divergences, though whether this delusion came from the picture or her own subconscious, she never knew. Maybe the picture was her way of dealing with ideas her rational mind was at first incapable of accepting; while her conscious mind struggled to make sense of what she had read in Daniel’s papers, her subconscious was sifting the information and drawing (literally, it seemed) its own conclusions.
Alice had somehow believed it all along.
In some ways, it was a relief to accept this; believe in the irrational, she thought inconsequentially, and anything becomes possible; even in Looking-Glass Land there were rules, if you only knew where to look. She studied the picture further, paying especial attention to the two figures standing by the water; it seemed to her that at least one of them, the one with the hat, should be familiar. There was something about the way he was standing, the slight stoop of his shoulders, the light reflecting from the lenses of his glasses …
Joe.
Joe and Daniel?
Daniel and Joe.
And as the last important piece of the puzzle slammed into place like a door on to the world of reason, Alice picked up her paintbrush one last time, and added the name of the picture to the bottom of the canvas, without thinking, knowing that the act was as inevitable as all the other acts which had led up to this one moment.
Poor Daniel, she thought, and wrote, in neat precise capitals:
RETRIBUTION: THE CHOSEN OF OPHELIA
One
I WALKED IN nightmare along that road, the hunger at my heels all the time. The brain of which I was so unjustly proud was filled with unaccustomed turmoil; the scent of blood was in my nostrils, and though I fought my growing certainties, I weakened in the face of that hunger, weakened as any normal man would.
I have always thought of myself as a Christian; I did not lie or steal, and if I had lustful thoughts I hid them well; my sins were the little sins of a man very like other men; my thoughts never touched either despair or the sublime. Suddenly, in the space of a night and a day, everything was different. I would never be like other men again, and the knowledge was like damnation inside me. How can I convey to you the depths of my horror then, the first time I looked at myself and saw the beast under the skin? Later, when I had looked upon such things too often to be broken, I was able to view what happened dispassionately, almost scientifically, but there were many mirrors and icons to be broken before then, many forbidden pages to be turned. So I walked, and I hungered, and I kept my face in shadow so that the
passers-by could not recognize the murder in my eyes.
Murder.
The word meant nothing to me as I walked blindly through the streets, my hands in my pockets to hide their trembling. It was a pit, spiralling downwards into never-never-never, huge as destiny. Just a word, superimposed like a photographic negative over everything I saw, bigger than God. Believe me, I fought it as long as I could, but it was insidious, twisting and turning in my mind, hallucinating, casting kaleidoscope images into the painful grid of my reason. For seconds at a time I was apart from reality, spinning, hunger riding my brain like a child on a fairground helter-skelter; several times I ducked into side-streets or shady archways and retched, pain digging sharp fingers under my ribs. And all that I endured, ultimately, for nothing. Strange, that I should still feel pride at not giving in immediately. Grant me that much humanity, that I did not give in at once.
I never made it to Rosemary’s apartment – I did not expect to – though I did get as far as the river. The streets were not as crowded as I had feared, and though groups of students congregated outside the public houses, I was not obliged to touch them or go too near. I was glad of that; the very smell of them made my head spin. A couple of policemen passed me; I was conscious of a wary glance flicked in my direction. Paranoid, I quickened my step, imagining that they had seen something of my altered condition. My hands were shaking. As I came to Magdalene Bridge (the irony was not lost to me), I suffered a particularly violent spasm which left me breathless and trembling, and I managed to climb down on to the banking, and from there, under the bridge itself, where it was dark and cool, and, I thought, I would be able to rest without being seen and questioned.
I settled myself on a narrow ledge in the shadow of the bridge. The air was cold and sweaty, the underside of the bridge green with mould, but at least I felt safer there. Someone passed above my head; I felt the heat of their footsteps, imagined I saw it, like a torch shining through thick cloth, a faint glimmer on the water, closed my eyes. Only a few moments, I deluded myself, just a few minutes’ rest, and I would be myself again. All I needed was the coolness of the water, the moist silence of stone to still what was raging inside me. I waited.