I frowned, as if I were trying to remember.
‘No, I was on my own that night, and I really didn’t do very much,’ I said. ‘I went for a walk around the town, as I usually do on a fine evening, then I worked on my thesis.’ I caught his glance. ‘I’m writing a book.’
‘Fiction?’
‘Oh, no.’ I shook my head. ‘Another stuffy academic tome, I’m afraid. A study in Pre-Raphaelite archetypes. It’s a bit of a hobby-horse of mine.’
Turner nodded as if he understood.
‘And the Swan Inn? Have you ever been there?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t go out very much,’ I explained. ‘And when I do, I tend to go to restaurants or the theatre, not to inns. I don’t have a good head for alcohol.’
I saw his quick glance at the open whisky bottle on the bedstand, and cursed myself for being too talkative. ‘For a friend,’ I explained quickly.
The Inspector lingered for another few minutes, endless minutes they seemed to me, then he left, raising his hat to me with a polite: ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Holmes.’ And as soon as he was safely behind that door again, I gave myself up to the outpouring of my tension. I was certain that he knew; how, I could not tell, for I was equally certain that he had no proof.
When I began to think rationally again, I considered what dangers he might present to me. He was a policeman, he was trained to detect guilt; but I was inclined to think that the advantage was nevertheless on my side. The truth was so incredible that it would take him longer than a lifetime to discover it; and now that I suspected that he was watching me, I could prepare myself. But what if he had me followed? I thought.
The immediacy of my mind’s reply stunned me for a moment; unhesitatingly, it flung back, not a thought, but an image of such stark intensity that it overwhelmed me momentarily. It was the image of myself striking, leaping as an animal leaps, my knife held facing upwards, a flicker of light in the shadows. I imagined myself striking, blood spraying across my face precious as the fount of life; saw the man beneath me fall, drowning, disbelieving. I felt the day’s meal clench inside me like a fist, and I retched, dry, sharp bursts of nausea which turned into a recurrence of my hacking cough.
Not yet, my mind whimpered, as I clutched my stomach, doubled up on my bed; but the knowledge, untouched by remorse or nausea, stayed with me all the same. Thought made flesh, I thought to myself, with a hysterical cackle of laughter; and though a part of me still whimpered and wept, it was that thought, the knowledge that if I had to I would kill him, yes, and feed on his corpse, that followed me, relentlessly, into the unconsciousness of sleep, and the cryptic convolutions of my labyrinthine dreams.
Two
ALICE COULD NO more have passed a fair by than she could have ignored a packet of biscuits in her food cupboard. It was not that she particularly liked fairs; rather, she liked the idea of them, the memories of childhood that they recreated, better than the reality. Popcorn stands, coconut shies, candy-floss – pink sugar-sticky nests for wasps – tall men with loud voices and cold travelling eyes, the roundabouts and the big wheels and the hot dogs and the litter and the smells; wagons with gilt doorways and exotic secret signs. Pushing and shoving, children jostling for pockets in the crowd … doughnuts, spending all her pocket money on the shooting range only to win a single yellow balloon which burst on the way home, the high reek of animals in tiny cages, flying high on the big wheel, walking through the fair late at night with Joe. Joe winning a coconut on the stand, laughing. Joe eating pizza from a greasy paper plate, watching the stars both electric and real. A maelstrom of conflicting memories, like confetti, showered her from every side. For a moment, she looked at the worn, faded sign, gilt and red: FAIR! BIGGEST IN THE SOUTH! BIG RIDES!! Remembered, reached for her purse, and walked in.
Voices, music, voices, noises; beginning-of-summer British at play. And in the background, the lovely spires and turrets of the colleges, incongruous and timeless above the crowd. Alice smiled, tucked her shopping bag under one arm and began to move towards a toffee-apple stall, bought the biggest, stickiest-looking apple she could see, and moved away, taking her little circle of tranquillity with her. Aimlessly, happily, she wandered through the field, occasionally pausing to watch the roundabout with its thin, wild-eyed horses rushing past, the people at the stalls. (A father of three trying to win a teddy bear at the shooting-range: ‘Go on Dad!’; a wide-eyed schoolboy staring enviously at the hoopla, twenty pound notes taped enticingly on to wooden blocks, the caption RING IT RICH; a tall, thin boy of sixteen at the dartboard, grinning, lifting a giant pink rabbit into the arms of a laughing girl.)
A man pushed past her, one hand stuck in the pocket of his coat, the other holding a can of beer, he was almost close enough to Alice for his swatch of dyed black hair to brush her face. For an instant, he seemed fleetingly familiar, and she strained to see his face, but he disappeared into the amusements arcade before she could know for sure. She bit into her apple again; it was a good one, tart and pink inside, the deep-red toffee still slightly warm from the steaming vat of sugar on the stand, outer shell just beginning to go hard. She wondered why toffee-apples always turned out to be so difficult to eat: too wide to bite into, too sticky to get a firm hold on to. She had to take tiny, tiny bites, delicately working at the outer shell with the tip of her tongue. A man with tattoos on his face was selling rides on the roundabout; for a moment Alice was tempted, but decided against it. Fairground rides are only fun when you’re not alone, she thought (doggedly shaking the memory of another Alice, hand-in-hand with another Joe, endlessly neck to-neck in an interminable roundabout race between two horses, dappled grey and pink with cornsilk manes, while the roundabout played ‘Camptown Races’ and the world spun to a different tempo), and moved on.
He was standing by the main gate, unmistakable this time, stranger in the sunlight than he ever was at night. Even the crowds of students seemed to skirt him, so that he stood alone in a little pocket of isolation. Despite the warmth of the day, he was wearing his coat buttoned and turned up at the collar, and beneath it, at his ankles, she caught the gleam of sunlight on the chains of his motorcycle boots. Impossible to know whether he had seen her; surrounded by people as she was, there was no cause to be stricken with panic, but she was.
He seemed to be waiting.
She turned, mingling with the crowd again. Suddenly, her eyes were everywhere, testing, measuring the crowd with a new insight. ‘If Java is there, then maybe Rafe is, too,’ she thought; and on the tail of that, ‘If Rafe is there … maybe the others … Elaine, Zach, Anton.’ Maybe other ones she had not yet seen. Perhaps they were watching her in the crowd. Perhaps they were waiting for her.
Once again she quickened her pace. The smells of the fairground were much stronger now, dizzying; the crowd parted to allow her to pass, and she felt singled out, too noticeable. She began to jog towards the far end of the field, where the caravans and the animals were, where she could slip out unseen, in safety. A face snapped up out of the mill of people to look at her; a man with red hair tied back, black crosses dangling from his ears. Alice met his eyes for a moment … saw the bird tattoo on his face. He flashed an insolent, disturbing grin at her, blurred again into the crowd. A woman brushed by her with a touch as light as snow; she started, looked around, but the woman was gone. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a thin figure standing beside a hot-dog stand, flaxen hair shocking in the bright sunlight … she wheeled round, convinced that this time, she knew it … she saw a girl, eyes hidden under a spray-mask of black make-up, bleached hair puffed out from her head. She ran in slow motion to the end of the field, slipped in between two caravans, washing hanging from a guy-rope between them, looked for the way out. A goat, tethered to a railing, interrupted its grazing for a moment to fix her with a long, glassy stare. She skirted round a sleeping dog, muzzle in its paws, and rounded the caravan.
‘Hello, Alice.’ It was the girl from the hot-dog stand; for a moment, Alice felt no panic.
Then, as she took in the face, the features behind the make-up, the hair coarsely sprayed white showing traces of red still at the roots, she froze. Stupidly, she stood there, her eyes wide, her hands dangling absurdly, the only motion in a world of stillness.
Ginny took a step forwards.
Alice dodged in-between the caravans, heedless now of the dog, which looked up and started a loud, aggressive barking. She was a long way from the crowd of holidaymakers now, isolated at the end of the field. Her feet were heavy on the baked ground; the world juddered and jolted as she ran. There was a man coming towards her; red hair and earrings, a bird tattooed on one cheekbone.
He smiled, the sunlight snickering off his gold tooth. He pulled something from his pocket, something which flicked the sunlight into Alice’s eyes in a long ribbon of polished steel. With a gasp, she changed course abruptly and dashed off across the field towards the people.
Behind her, Ginny made a tiny sign to Zach and Rafe, and the three of them fanned out, walking purposefully towards the other end of the field. Beneath the sprayed mask Ginny was smiling, and in her hand she carried a fat post office envelope.
Two
JOE QUICKENED HIS step, eyes flicking left, right, left into the side-streets as he moved. His pace was elastic, half-running, half-walking, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders slightly hunched. He might have been an eccentric poet, on his way to some mysterious rendezvous, some crazed bespectacled inventor racing towards a new discovery.
For an instant, he stopped in mid-stride, thinking he saw her, then moved on. He saw her in a dozen places after that … but when he turned, Ginny was never there. It was past two now; she should have been home. She should have left a message, at least. He slowed his pace fractionally, trying to analyse the sense of urgency which had motivated him. He remembered Alice telling him how Ginny had gone out that night, telling him how two men had come looking for her, two men who were her friends. A vision of Ginny sitting in some JCR, some public lavatory, maybe a bus shelter or a bandstand in the park … Ginny smiling … nodding … Ginny shooting a long needle into her arm while the friends looked on, smiling.
He began to run, checking every little passageway, every shop window, every archway, railing or gate. She should never have gone without telling him, he thought. The world was full of bloodsuckers, profit merchants eager to take advantage of someone as innocent as Ginny. How she had managed to get this far without going under he didn’t know, especially after what she had told him the other night, strangely childlike, strangely untouched, sitting in his armchair, hugging her knees. She had told him everything. The drugs, the dirt, the men … with a little smile and a wistfulness in her eyes. By all rights the bloodsuckers should have got her.
Strange little girl … but she had guts enough not to let the bastards grind her down. She had gone right back to the edge and had come back all on her own, and that made her stronger than he was, stronger and braver.
With increasing anxiety Joe continued his search of the streets of Cambridge. Figures milled around him. The primitive rhythm of the crowd intensified the throbbing of his headache; the distant music of the fairground tunnelled into his brain.
Joe didn’t like fairs much. There was something sinister about them, he thought, about the people who came and went, carrying the promise of returned childhood under those faded canvases, under that well-oiled and hidden machinery. Once, when he was a child, his father had taken him to the fair; like all little boys, he had loved it, had eaten candy-floss and baked potatoes, ridden on the round about, bought a balloon from an old woman with a scarf round her head and the warmest, most twinkling eyes he had ever seen … and right at the end, when his father had suggested that maybe they might get going home now, he had insisted on having one last ride on the round about.
‘OK, Joey.’ Joey’s dad had always been the most tolerant of fathers; half a child himself, he had had just as good a time as Joey himself that day, and he had sat Joey comfortably down on the jewelled saddle of the big fairground horse and had turned away to look at the arcade.
‘Hi-ho, Silver!’ Joey had whispered. ‘I’m the Lone Ranger.’ Liking the sound of the phrase, he had repeated it: ‘I’m the Lone Ranger!’ As if in agreement, the roundabout had begun to move. Being six, Joey had momentarily felt the ripple of Silver’s muscles beneath the hard pink hide; the horse had bucked, and the Lone Ranger had fought bravely to keep on. ‘Hi ho, Silver, awayyy!’ he had cried, and the roundabout had sped up, the horses spinning and bucking, black horses and white horses and exotic red and blue and yellow horses, their manes flying, their glass eyes wild and frenzied. Joey had been ecstatic. He had felt as if all eyes were turned towards him, the brave boy on the wild horse. He had gripped the jingling reins with fierce joy, faces blurring around him with the speed of the ride. Suddenly, a face had swum up towards him out of the half-gloom; neon-lit and almost ghostly in the changed light, he had recognized the balloon woman, earrings glinting exotically in a million refracted undersea colours.
‘Heyyy!’ Joey had shouted, recognizing a friend, but the roundabout had moved on, spinning like a sun. I’ll call to her when I get round the other side, Joey had thought, grinning in anticipation, holding his breath for the biggest shout he could give, loosing his left hand from the reins to wave … but when he had reached the other side, the shout had died in his throat, the grin from his face; the sight of the balloon woman had been etched into his memory long after the roundabout moved away, long after it had stopped. She had been standing at the edge of a little group of people, a family, perhaps, though there might have been two families: a round, balding, red-faced man, a younger man with a beard, two women, one with a baby, and some other children.
The one who caught Joey’s eye was a little boy, maybe his age or maybe a little older, a round, sturdy little boy wearing dungarees and holding a blue balloon in one hand and a half-finished candy-floss in the other. His eyes had been round and very serious. Joey liked to think that the boy had been watching him, the brave boy on horseback, and had made sure he looked especially big and reckless every time he passed him. There had been a purse sticking out of the little boy’s pocket, at the back, the kind of purse you don’t miss in a hurry, yellow and with a picture of Donald Duck on the front … but this time when Joey passed them, the purse had been missing. He had known it was missing because he had seen it, for just one instant, in the hand of the cheerful old balloon woman, before she had noticed him noticing and stuffed it into her pocket. And that was why little Joey had ridden for the rest of his roundabout-trip without shouting, without jigging on the horse and shaking its mane, without doing anything but going over and over what he had just seen.
In a way, Joey had known that in that moment part of his childhood was over. He had got off the roundabout as stiff and straight as a little soldier, suddenly desperate to leave … but she had been there and waiting for him, and Joey had been smitten with terror that she might touch him, that she might curse him like those princes who were turned into swans, and he had begun to run towards the arcade where Daddy was … but not before the witch had caught hold of his shoulder with a brown old hand like a claw, not before he had looked into her eyes and she had whispered, with all of her venom and ancient rage: ‘You never saw nothin’, did you boy? Never saw nothin’!’
And Joey had nodded, going white, backing away like a cornered cat, because if he hadn’t, he had been certain that this witch-woman would have killed him. And suddenly here was Daddy, Daddy coming out of the arcade, calling in his loud and cheerful voice, and in that moment Joey had wrenched himself free from the old witch’s claw and run away towards the light. He had dreamed of her later, but he had never told.
And it was on the tail of that half-submerged memory that the thought struck him – no, not the thought, the knowledge. Of course! That was where he should look for Ginny. If she was in trouble, it would come from the fair. He did not know why, but the knowledge was suddenly real enough.
&nbs
p; She was there.
He quickened his step.
Two
ALICE REALIZED SOON enough that there was nowhere to go. Behind her, there was Rafe and Zach and Ginny, and, at the exit, Java waited, with that air of steady confidence. The envelope in Ginny’s hand had paralysed Alice’s ability to think; her mind raced in circles, fragments of thoughts chasing each other around her brain. How had she found the manuscript that Alice had left with Menezies? The post office envelope filled the world, bore down upon her like the Juggernaut. Then she was running, holding her shoes as she sprinted barefoot across the field.
As she reached the main part of the fairground, she glanced briefly over her shoulder, and she caught Ginny’s gaze across the crowd, and Alice knew that she was not safe, that the crowd could afford no more protection to her than a herd of cattle. The only realities were here, between the cold lavender eyes of the nightwalker-thing (all vestiges of the human stripped from her face, unmasked in all her hatred) and the knowledge in Alice’s own eyes, the knowledge which enabled her to see what no one else could see, the monster behind the lovely face.
Maybe that was what stopped her. Maybe it was that look above the black spray-mask, the triumph in the cold gaze … she held it, like a bridge of ice, held the gaze and returned it, with all the hate which she was capable of conveying.
She could see that Ginny understood her. She smiled, showing her teeth. Now, as if her anger had cleansed her of fear, Alice felt suddenly cool and controlled. From the corner of her eye she saw someone moving towards her, and instead of moving back, she moved forward, smiling fiercely all the time.
She felt rather than saw the figure stop. Someone must have known that this was no place for a confrontation. Someone was afraid of the risk. Somewhere between here and there they had locked in combat, she and Ginny. No more fear, she thought. They understood each other too well for that. Round one began.