A Love Like Blood

Back in the bedsit, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was getting long, almost at my shoulders. I had a thick beard that I’d started to grow in Scotland, and now saw no need to remove. Even my face seemed to have changed shape and colour. My skin was sallow and greasy, and I had lost weight. I had been eating badly, neither often nor well, and had been drinking more than was good for me.

  I stared closely at my skin and saw grime in the lines around my eyes, and wondered when I had stopped washing myself properly.

  I gazed out of the window, across the railway tracks. It was the line that led to Cambridge, I knew, and my thoughts went back to better days, when I had sat at Hunter’s elbow over good food and cheap enough wine, and we’d been friends.

  Then I began to cry for Hunter, and I could not stop, did not stop until I knew I was crying for me too, and then anger welled up in me and I hated myself, but then my hate turned outwards and I knew where it had gone.

  The details of Hunter’s death were slowly emerging, and it got worse with every reading. There was always talk of the quantity of blood found around the body and in the room. One day, The Times reported how inside sources had revealed that the missing Dr Jackson had interestingly been questioned over some pornographic photographs of children shortly before his disappearance. Interestingly. The same turn of phrase that the French had used about Marian’s murder, the word that had made my blood burn with rage. Yes, it was interesting. Interesting that Marian had been ripped to pieces and her genitals mutilated. Interesting that Hunter was a homosexual. Interesting that his missing friend was a paedophile. Once again I was furious at the unspoken connection between these things. The deep insinuations. Yes, they were saying, all perverts are perverts of every kind, of the most sordid nature. They are all worshipping the devil and eating babies and fucking your children, and it’s very, very interesting.

  And finally, one day, I read that interestingly some words in Latin had been written on the wall of Hunter’s room, using his own blood.

  Mors mihi vita est.

  Death is life to me.

  Of course, I was scared to start with.

  I was a wanted man. Maybe not for Hunter’s murder, though I couldn’t be sure of that. But at the very least, I would be in difficult waters. There was too much to explain, and I feared every day that Hayes’ death would be discovered, and linked to me.

  And I was scared of Lippe, or Verovkin, or whoever he was this month. His name no longer mattered to me. I could still see his face in that hole in the park in Saint-Germain. The look on that face, that mocking look. I had seen him again, in both Paris and Avignon, and he had looked the same, a little older maybe, but only a little. And all I saw was the same thing: some hint in his eyes of a distorted mind, a mocking disdain for others. Every day I feared pursuit down the street, the sound of footsteps in an alley, the shape of his face rising before me in nightmares.

  So I stayed in hiding. I had enough cash to see me survive in a meagre way for a year or two, if need be. I just had to be careful not to be mugged or robbed, but with every day that passed, I felt with ever-growing certainty that the danger had passed. No one knew where I was, no one knew how I looked. I had changed my name, and I moved my lodgings every month, always to a new part of London, which I discovered had an inexhaustible supply of cheap and filthy rooms to rent by the day, if that was what was required.

  I spent the rest of the year brooding, slipping away into deeper and deeper places, and my thoughts became darker with each passing week.

  As Christmas rolled into my view again, I knew I was safe. It seemed very certain that neither the police nor Verovkin had any idea where I was, or indeed who I was. But if I was safe from outside forces, I was not safe from myself.

  If I looked in the mirror, which was a rare thing, I barely knew who I was seeing. I watched my eyes looking back, uncomprehending.

  I stared at Charles Jackson, hard, and for a long time, because I wanted to be sure I knew what I had become, or rather, what I would become when I had done what I wanted to do.

  I was going to kill him.

  I spent some time in the London Library most weeks, and I found that the Latin scrawled on the wall in Hunter’s blood was a family motto. Of a British family in fact: Wolseley. I made a few faint attempts to investigate the modern branches of this family, hunting for a man of the right generation, of the right age, who might be Verovkin, but in the end I concluded that this was a dead end, that he was merely using the Latin to taunt me.

  And I began to read about blood again, of perversions and taboos associated with it, and I began to wonder what his mind was really like, whether he really had been drinking the blood of that girl in the bunker, and Marian’s too.

  Certainly I had seen blood drunk in that blasphemous ritual in Avignon, and when I recalled that, and pictured the scene of that terrible night again, I wondered what the taste of blood would be like.

  The London Library held another book that I wanted to read, namely The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer. Referenced frequently in Freud’s work, I’d seen it mentioned from time to time in the reading I’d done in Edinburgh. I wanted to see for myself a few pertinent passages from the eleven volumes that comprise the third edition of the book, a book so wide-ranging that the index and references alone constitute a twelfth volume.

  Here, then, in The Magic Art, I read of the use of blood by various peoples around the world, of its use in magical systems, sometimes as a substance of power, or life-giving energies, or conversely sometimes as a thing of taboo. How the men of the Wimbaio cut their penises and let the blood spurt across their thighs before warfare, for unity and strength, and how if one of their men harmed his wife, he would be cut and his blood allowed to flow over her until he fainted.

  I read about the drinking of blood.

  In many places, this appears to have been taboo. Some of the old tribes of Esthonia would not take blood since it contained the animal’s soul, but there were many more examples to the contrary.

  I read how the priestesses of Aegira in Ancient Greece would drink the blood of the bull to assist in making their prophesies. How various tribes in central Australia would use human blood to fortify their sick and aged. How the Takhas of Kashmir would drink the blood of decapitated captives.

  In Spirits of the Corn and the Wild, I read how the flesh and blood of dead men were commonly eaten and drunk to inspire bravery, or wisdom. Or so said Frazer, citing the Basutos as eating the hearts of their enemies. I read how Sir Charles McCarthy had his heart eaten by the Ashantee so that they could imbibe his courage.

  I read how the Sioux Indians, the Yoruba of the Slave Coast and the Indians of the Orinoco all dried and powdered their enemies’ hearts to gain their valiance. How the young men of the Esquimaux of the Bering Strait would drink the blood of their first enemy killed.

  I read how the Masai drink fresh blood and milk from their cattle, and the thought that black pudding, or blood sausage, or something similar to it, is a dish eaten in many, many countries did little to make me feel less uneasy.

  I felt sick, but I read on nonetheless.

  I read about taboo, about taboos of menstrual blood, how it was considered unclean, even destructive to men. And though Frazer did not mention it, I had already read about one of the laws of the Catholic Church contained in the Corpus iuris canonici, which made the assumption that since women bleed they were therefore unclean and threatened the holiness of the church.

  I had read enough. I wanted to know no more.

  Whatever my enemy was, whatever had made him, it made no difference to me. It was what he’d done that mattered to me, not why, and it was that that I was motivated by.

  It was then, as the dark December days closed around me even tighter, and my thoughts grew even wilder, that I sat at the little table in my latest fleapit of a rented room, with a knife and a cup in front of me.

  I stared at the things.

  I had been careful. I had bought a small, sharp penknife
and a bottle of neat alcohol, with which I had made both the blade and the skin of my forearm antiseptic. I had a simple tourniquet ready, in the form of my belt, and dressings and sticking plaster with which to stop the wound as soon as possible.

  I was, I had been, a doctor, after all, and I only wished to know what blood tasted like, not to hurt myself in the process.

  I picked up the knife and, carefully selecting a vein, pushed it into my skin till it bent deep under the pressure, but I still needed to push harder to make the cut.

  I stared again at my forearm, I stared at the blade of the knife, and I looked at the grey-blue line of the vein under my skin, and still I hesitated.

  Then I yelled in frustration and with a giant sweep of my arm sent the whole lot flying on to the threadbare carpet of my room.

  I had determined that I would find Verovkin, and hunt him, and stop him from being. That was how I said it to myself. Not kill, or murder, but just stop him. I wanted him not to be any more, I couldn’t bear that he lived on in his hideous way while Hunter and Marian were dead, and who knew, maybe many more young women besides.

  So I wanted to put an end to him, but as the months moved on, and spring came, I had not found him, nor even tried, in truth. I sat in the many hovels I lived in during that time feeling as if I was a monster in a lair, but I did nothing. I was nothing.

  I was powerless and slowly rotting away, and then, one day, I picked up the newspaper, and I knew I had found him again.

  Chapter 7

  Of course, there was every possibility that it was a trap. I knew that from the start, but I didn’t mind if it was. I understood completely that he might be waiting for me, but if he was, so be it.

  Overnight, I changed. I had been running, running and hiding, and now I was no longer scared, and it was time to pursue him, not have him pursue me.

  If I had been afraid of him, I was now ready to face him. I saw myself as his equal at last. He had always had money on his side. It meant he could move at will, create new personas and new lives for himself wherever he went, and I had been unable to find him, but now we were the same. I had money. Lots of it, maybe even more than he had, and I could use it.

  Once I got to Geneva, I would be safe taking my money out, and just as I didn’t know his name, he no longer knew mine.

  I felt as if the months of dirty torpor I had suffered had fallen away in a stroke, I felt as if I’d stored up every bit of energy I might have been using during that time, and that it had all rushed to the surface of my skin that morning.

  And all this because of the article I read in The Times.

  The headline: Miracle cure for ‘blasphemous’ girl. The subject: the bizarre story of an apparent impossibility, a female haemophiliac.

  The journalist, since he was writing for The Times, should have known better, or done a little research, or phoned up one of the country’s experts on haemophilia, which, until what happened in Rome, would have included me.

  A ten-year-old girl from the Alban Hills had made international headlines. She was bleeding, and the priest of the tiny village where she lived declared that she was a stigmatic. This was news that spread within Italy, for it made good reading for the Catholic buyers of newspapers. What sent the story worldwide was this. The priest was making big claims for little Giovanna Scozzo, but if he was delighted with his potential saint-in-waiting, her parents were not. Despite being devout Catholics, they had shamed themselves and the little village of Chiesa di Sasso by wanting to see if their daughter could be cured, and had taken her, eventually, to a doctor in Rome.

  The doctor had declared that she was a haemophiliac, and had immediately been condemned by the world’s media and even many of his colleagues, since everyone knows that only male haemophiliacs exhibit the disease, females being mere carriers of the defective gene.

  This information was pounced upon by the credulous, who gave it as prima facie evidence that Giovanna was in fact a miracle child, and should be revered as such.

  The Times’s correspondent did little to clear up the matter, since in fact we had known for almost ten years about the varieties of clotting-factor abnormalities that cause the various types of the disease. And while haemophilia A and B are sex-linked, haemophilia C is not, and can appear in either sex, albeit in a milder form than the other types.

  There was, of course, another possibility. The girl herself could actually be type A or B. An extremely rare, though not impossible, event, occurring only where the girl is the child of a haemophiliac father and a haemophilia-carrying mother. Yes, an extremely rare event, but one made much more common in areas of heavy inbreeding. Such as in small villages in the Lazio hills, such as in Chiesa di Sasso, where, I read, an incredible ninety per cent of the population shared the same surname: Scozzo. I could find no mention of whether the girl’s father was a haemophiliac, but equally, I found no word that he was not, so my hypothesis was not yet disproven.

  So far, it was just an interesting piece of gossip from the Mediterranean. What made me sit bolt upright on the bus as I read to the conclusion of the piece was this. A clinic on the shores of Lake Geneva had heard about Giovanna’s case, and was ready and willing to see what could be done for the girl, though it would be at a cost only the likes of a Swiss clinic could command. The girl’s parents were desperate to accept. The unwritten yet clear implication in the story was horrific. So far, the girl’s bleeding had been profuse and prolonged, yet she had always pulled through in the end. But she was prepubescent, and what happened for her at menarche would be more than the trauma common for most girls. Because when Giovanna had her first period, she would die.

  Her parents could not begin to afford the trip, let alone the cost of treatment, and a kind Swiss philanthropist, who wished to remain anonymous, had stepped forward to aid the girl’s plight. He was prepared to bring the girl to Lausanne, where some of the world’s leading clinicians might be able to help her.

  I knew who the philanthropist was. It was him, and I knew it was almost certainly a trap for me. At the very least he would be expecting me, waiting for me, but I gave that no thought at all. Within a week I was crossing the Channel, bound for Lake Geneva.

  Chapter 8

  Of course, that turned out to be harder than it should have been.

  I was still wanted for questioning. My passport was in Cambridge, in the police station, and even if I’d had it, I couldn’t have used it to travel, because I was still a wanted man.

  I had to find another way to cross the Channel.

  I took a train to Dover where I hung out in some of its roughest pubs. I took my time, I waited a couple of days, visiting drinking haunts in Folkestone and Deal, until I got to know the kind of place I was in. One evening, dressed as poorly as I could manage, I struck up conversation with a fisherman in a pub called the Falstaff, a short walk from the harbour.

  I asked him if it was possible to get across the water.

  He didn’t reply, so I added that I meant without using the regular ferry service.

  Still he didn’t reply, but finished his pint, and then nodded at a rough man sitting in the corner. I watched him for a while, and then, when the landlord called last orders, I wandered over and offered to buy him a drink.

  He swore at me and called me queer, and I was reminded of that private who’d thought I was after the same thing. It made me angry; I wondered why these stupid men had to be so coarse, or if there was something about me that gave off such signals.

  I held up my hand and said I wasn’t offering the drink for free, but in return for some information, and that was how I found a man crazy enough to sail me across the Channel in the middle of the night in a small fishing boat for fifty pounds.

  His name was Dyer and I didn’t trust him in the slightest.

  I’d offered him twenty-five pounds to begin with, and he’d easily haggled me up to fifty. He knew I was desperate, and I also guessed he knew I had more money on me than fifty pounds.

  He told me to meet
him, the following evening, outside the Falstaff.

  He arrived on a pushbike very late, and told me it was off for the night. The weather was rough and he didn’t fancy it. He told me to meet him again the following night, which I did, and the one after that, until finally he was ready to chance it.

  ‘Get on,’ he said, and I must have stared at him.

  ‘We’re not moored here,’ he said, and so I climbed on the parcel rack of the bike as if we were two kids mucking about, and he set off grimly out of Dover, wordlessly pushing the pedals and hauling both our weights down the coast, to Folkestone.

  Just outside the harbour was a headland known, appropriately enough, as Little Switzerland, and he’d beached his boat, the Margareta, on the shore there.

  He explained it was far too risky to put out from Dover, which was crawling with customs men and the harbour patrol. He’d sailed the boat round earlier that afternoon and borrowed the bike from a mate of his.

  We both had to work hard to shove the Margareta back out into the shallows, soaking ourselves, then I clambered aboard as he got the diesel motor chugging into life.

  ‘Where are we going to put ashore?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘A lot of things.’

  I was getting more and more suspicious the more time I spent with Dyer. I knew he knew I had a bit of money in that little suitcase of mine. Maybe he had no intention of putting a few hundred yards out to sea and then ditching me, and heading home with the easiest catch he’d ever make, and the most lucrative.

  He’d get a surprise when he opened that case. Not just a few more quid; I still had enough money left for Dyer to buy himself a new boat.

  I pictured the events in my mind, and worked out where to put myself to be safest, and I grew afraid.

  But then, he didn’t know I had a revolver.

  ‘Get below,’ he said, nodding at the hatch in the wheelhouse. It would mean passing him, and turning my back on him.