Innocent Blood

by P. D. James

  She had dropped her eyes at last. Clumsily gathering up the roses, she whispered sulkily: “There were other men that liked me. George Bocock liked me.”

  Who in God’s name was George Bocock, he wondered. The name struck a chord. Of course, that pimply youth who had been a clerk in the university admissions office. So he had been competing with George Bocock. If that didn’t puncture his self-esteem, nothing would.

  At dinner she was more withdrawn than usual, less, he thought, from her customary shyness, than because she was preoccupied with her private thoughts. They had guests, and it wasn’t until they were alone together in the bedroom that they had an opportunity to talk. Then she said, forcing out the words belligerently as if half expecting him to remonstrate: “I want to give up the juvenile Bench.”

  “Resign your commission. Why?”

  “I’m not any good at it. I don’t help anyone. And I don’t like it. I’ll finish this three-month stint, but I won’t do any more.”

  “If you feel like that, then there’s no point in going on. You’d better write to the Lord Chancellor’s office. But I suggest you try to think of some less childish reason.”

  “Not doing any good, not being able to help anyone isn’t a childish reason.”

  “What will you do with the extra time? Do you want me to talk to Gwen Marshall about the possibility of school-care work? They’re always looking for suitable people.”

  “Why should I be any better at that? I can fill up my time.”

  She paused, and then said: “I want a dog.”

  “In London? Is that fair? It won’t be easy to exercise him.”

  “There are places, the Embankment Gardens, St. James’s Park.”

  “I should have thought there were enough dogs fouling the public parks. But if you’re sure, you’d better decide what breed you want and we’ll find some reputable kennels. We could do it this weekend.”

  His magnanimity surprised him. And perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. She and Philippa hadn’t exactly been companions, but the house probably seemed empty without her. A dog needn’t inconvenience him if the animal were properly trained. They could drive to the kennels that weekend, make an excursion of it.

  She said: “I don’t care about the breed. I want a stray from the Battersea Dogs’ Home.”

  He said irritably: “Really Hilda, if you’re determined on a dog, at least get a good-looking animal.”

  “I don’t care about good looks. You and Philippa do, but I don’t. I want a stray, a dog no one has claimed, one who’ll have to be destroyed if they can’t find it a home.”

  She turned from the dressing table and spoke for the first time with animation, almost pleadingly: “He won’t make a mess in the garden. I know how you feel about the roses. I’ll see he doesn’t get on the flower beds. I could train him. He can live in a basket in the kitchen. And he won’t be expensive. We waste a lot of food he could eat, and Mr. Pantley would be obliging with bones for him. I’m a good customer.”

  He said: “It’s all right I suppose, as long as you take responsibility for him.”

  It was like humouring an importunate child. She said sadly: “Oh yes, I’ll do that. I’ll look after him. That’s one thing I can do.”

  “If in making your choice, you contrive to be attracted to one of the smaller and less-yapping varieties, you would oblige me.”

  She knew then that it was going to be all right. She remembered that Philippa had once said that when Maurice spoke like a character in a Jane Austen novel it meant that he was in a good mood. The literary allusion meant nothing to her, but she had learned to recognize the tone. She would be able to have her dog. She pictured him, bright-eyed, head cocked up at her, tail quivering. It was no good naming him before she’d chosen him. She would have to see what he looked like. But she rather liked the name Scamp. Maurice and Philippa would say that it was too ordinary, too common, but that was the kind of dog she wanted. Lying down in the single bed in which Maurice so seldom joined her she felt a surge of confidence, almost of power. She wasn’t barren after all. It was his fault, not hers. She needn’t spend her life making up to him for a deprivation which was nothing to do with her. And after this three-month stint she need never sit on the Bench again.

  BOOK THREE

  ACT OF VIOLENCE

  1

  And now he moved with a mounting sense of excitement away from his settled routine at Pimlico and into a new world, their world. And the act itself was no longer hidden in an unknown future; the time had come to prepare himself physically and mentally for the deed. But he perceived a difference in himself. Shadowing Mrs. Palfrey, he, the follower, had nevertheless felt himself to be in control. She led and he shadowed, but the invisible cord between them had reined her to his controlling hands. It seemed to him that he had followed her in a state of gentle euphoria, unstressed by anxiety, certain that in the end she would lead him to his prey. Her loneliness, the sad futility of her life, the inevitability of her betrayal, had even bred in him a sense of pity and comradeship.

  It was different now; he was on enemy ground. He was shadowing two women, not one, and the girl had seen him and would recognize him again. He still remembered that moment in the rose garden with a mixture of shame and horror. And she was younger, keener-eyed, swifter, almost certainly more intelligent. His task had become infinitely more difficult and the risk of discovery greater. He would have to take his time, move with more cunning. The first task must be to watch from his hiding place on the wasteground and try to get some idea of their daily routine.

  It took him a week to discover where they went when they set out every evening at five o’clock. For three days he followed them at a distance up Mell Street then watched from the shelter of a chemist’s doorway until they mounted a number 16 bus going north up the Edgware Road. The next day he secreted himself closer to the bus stop until they arrived, then mounted the bus after them. They took seats on the lower deck, so he went quickly up the stairs. He took a ticket to the terminus to avoid giving a destination, then watched from the window at every stop to see where they got off. When at last, after a twenty-minute drive, he saw them alight at Cricklewood Broadway he made his way down the stairs, jumped off at the first red traffic light, and hurried back. But he was too late, they were nowhere in sight.

  The next evening he again took the bus, hurrying out of his hiding place to join it once they were safely aboard and again taking a seat on the top deck. But this time he was ready to alight, and he didn’t lose them. He was thirty yards behind them as they entered a fish and chip restaurant, Sid’s Plaice. He strolled past and joined a queue at the next bus stop, waiting to see if they emerged. After about ten minutes he strolled past the shop and looked through the glass window at the rows of formica-topped tables. They were nowhere to be seen. It didn’t surprise him; he had hardly supposed they would travel so far for an evening meal. So this was where they worked. The choice surprised him; but then he understood. They needed to take a job where the daughter would be in no danger of meeting people she knew, could be sure that no one would ask questions.

  After that he knew that he could relax his watch every evening between five o’clock and eleven. He couldn’t kill her during their bus journeys, nor while she was at work. But what about that late lonely walk down Mell Street? He pictured himself waiting for them one night, straining himself against the door to avoid being seen, knife ready. Then the lunge at her throat, the one word “Julie” spoken so low that only she would hear, the vicious double twist, the tearing flesh as the knife was wrenched free, and then his feet pounding down Delaney Street to the shelter of—where? It wouldn’t work; nothing about it rang true. That quick withdrawing knife, suppose it stuck, twisted in her muscles, was caught behind a bone? He would need time to force it out. He couldn’t leave the knife in the wound. Surely the blood must flow freely if she were to die. And the girl would be there, younger, stronger, swifter than he. How could he hope to get away?

 
Never once during the first week of his surveillance did he see them apart. They were together all day and, more important, they stayed together all night. Since he had rejected the idea of an attack on the murderess in the street, his plan depended on knowing when the girl had left her alone in the flat. He would have to find an excuse for calling, particularly after dark, but that shouldn’t be difficult. He would say that he had an urgent message from Caldecote Terrace for Philippa Palfrey. The fact that he knew the girl’s name and previous address would ensure that the murderess would at least let him in. And that was all he needed. It would be better if he could kill her while she slept, cleaner, more certain, less horrible, more seemly. But all he needed was to come face to face with her in that flat, and alone.

  He followed them on their daily excursions. Not because he expected an opportunity to kill, but because he was restless when they weren’t in sight. It was simple enough to trail them on the Underground. They usually went from Marylebone, the nearest station. He supposed that, on that first journey from King’s Cross, the girl had chosen Baker Street or Edgware Road on the Circle line to save them the time and trouble of a change of line. He would walk behind them at a safe distance, linger in the entrance tunnel while they stood on the platform, then enter a different compartment and stand at the door throughout the journey so that he could watch when they got off. After that it became more difficult. Sometimes prudence made him hang back and lose them. Occasionally they walked along the lonelier reaches of the river, through remote Georgian squares in Islington or the City, where any follower would have been conspicuous. Then he would stand and watch them through his binoculars over the parapet of a bridge, or from the shelter of a church porch or shop doorway, motionless until the two golden heads were out of sight.

  It had become less important to trail them, to keep them in sight, than to share their lives, to experience vicariously their interests and pleasures. He had become obsessed with them, itchy with restlessness when he was parted from them, terrified, despite the evidence of their settled way of life, that he might arrive one morning at Delaney Street to find them gone. He noted with obsessive concern the small details of their shared life, that it was the girl who seemed to be in control, who organized their lunching arrangements, taking the oblong plastic picnic box from her shoulder bag and handing it, opened, to her mother; that it was the girl who bought the tickets, who carried the map. He no longer thought of them apart and this, when it occurred to him, was worrying. One night he even had a confused nightmare in which it was the girl whom he killed. She was lying on his bed at the Casablanca, naked, and the wound in her throat was bloodless but gaping, like moistly parted lips. He turned round, the dripping knife in his hand, appalled at his mistake, to find his mother and the murderess standing together in the doorway and clutching at each other, screaming with laughter. The terror stayed with him next day and, for the first time since he had found them, it took an effort of will to leave the shelter of his room.

  He was bound to them by hate; he was bound to them, too, by envy. He never saw them touch, they didn’t often talk together; when they smiled it was the spontaneous smile of two people who laugh at the same things. They were like friends, undemonstrative, companionable, uneffusive, sharing their days because there was, at present, no other person with whom they preferred to be. So might he have walked and smiled and been companionable with his daughter.

  He might have gone on like that for weeks, following them during the daytime, returning to the hotel for his dinner, then waiting behind the iron fence at night, until at last he heard their returning footsteps, the door of number 12 close behind them, and saw the twin oblongs of light shine out from their windows. He hardly knew what he was hoping for, crouching there in the darkness. The girl was hardly likely to leave her mother alone in the flat so late at night. But until the light was finally extinguished he could not bear to leave. And then, on the morning of Saturday 9th September everything changed.

  They were shopping in Mell Street market, as they had on the previous Saturday, and he was shadowing them, anonymous in the milling crowd, watching from the shelter of the antique supermarket, from behind the bric-a-brac stalls, stepping back if their heads turned his way to conceal himself among the swinging hangers of cotton shirts, summer dresses and long printed Indian skirts. It was a bright, warm morning after an early mist and Mell Street was crowded. He was standing at the stall which sold mangoes and huge bunches of unripe bananas to the West Indian women, listening to their high staccato jabber and looking across the road to where the murderess and her daughter were rummaging in a cardboard carton of old linen. They seemed to be searching for pieces of lace. On the edge of the stall was an Australian bushranger’s hat, broad brimmed, turned up at the side. Suddenly the girl took it and perched it on her head. Her unbraided golden hair was flowing loose, a swinging curtain of gold. The strap of the hat hung under her chin. She turned on her heel towards her mother and tipped back the brim of the hat in a gesture defiant and debonair. Then she began searching in her shoulder bag for the money. She had bought it, that gallant, ridiculous hat. And the murderess laughed! Across the width of the road, above the rich West Indian voices, above the shouts of the buskers, the hysterical barking of the dogs, he could hear the laughter, a peal of joyous, spontaneous mirth.

  She was laughing. Julie was dead, Mavis was dead, and she was laughing. He was shaken not by anger, which he could have borne, but by a terrible grief. Julie was rotting in her grave. Her life had been choked out of her almost before it had begun. This woman was laughing, opening her throat to the sun. He had no child. She had her daughter alive, healthy, exulting in her candescent beauty as if nourished vampirelike by Julie’s blood. They walked in freedom. He slunk behind them like a scavenging animal. They sat companionably together in their shared home and smiled, talked, listened to music. He crouched alone in the cold, night after night, peering like a sexual voyeur through that slit in the wall. He heard again the voice of his Auntie Gladys, dead now like his mother, like Mavis, like Julie. She, being dead, yet speaketh: “That kid gives me the willies. He creeps round the place like some sodding animal.” Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing? He might as well cock his leg against the door of the derelict car that sheltered him and void his inadequacy, his self-disgust. The voice of his mother, as clear as if the words had once actually been spoken: “Murder! You? Don’t make me laugh.”

  He found that he was crying, soundless, wordless, unassuageable tears. They poured over his face, seeped like salty rain into his quavering mouth, splashed over his unavailing hands. He walked on through the crowds, seeing nothing. There was nowhere he could go, nowhere he could hide. There was no place in London where a man could cry in peace. He thought of Julie, anxious eyes behind the steel National Health spectacles, the braces on her teeth, a thin face armoured with metal. He so seldom admitted that shadowy face into his mind. The greatest horror of murder was that it degraded the memory of the dead. If Julie had died in illness, been killed in a road accident, he could have thought of her now with sadness, but with a measure of acceptance and in peace. Now all memories of his child were corrupted by anger, by a half-salacious horror, by hate. All pictures of her childhood had superimposed on them like faulty print the horror and humiliation of her dreadful end. The murderers had robbed him even of the common tribute which humanity pays to its dead. He seldom remembered, because it was too uncomfortable to remember. If both of them had hanged, would that have cleansed his thoughts or added a new dimension of horror to her death?

  He found that he had walked the length of Mell Street and now trembled on the very edge of the pavement where the stream of traffic flowed down the Edgware Road. He found himself longing for what he now thought of as home, that small high room at the Casablanca. But he had made a decision. This was the end of trailing after them like an animal twitching at the end of its string. If nothing could separate them, then he would have to get access to their flat. He would ha
ve to creep in at night when the murderess would be sleeping alone. And that meant that the time had come to steal the keys.

  2

  Since they had tacitly agreed that it was not yet time to talk about the lost years of their separation, they talked a great deal about books. With the past outlawed and the future uncertain, English literature was at least a shared experience which they could discuss without embarrassment or constraint, the safest of subjects. It was the more ironic that it should be a minute of commonplace literary chat over breakfast on Friday 15th September that led them directly to Gabriel Lomas.

  Philippa asked: “What did you read inside as well as Shakespeare?”

  “The Victorian novelists mostly. The library was better than you’d think. There are two main requirements for cell literature: inordinate length and the writer’s ability to create a distinctive and alternative world. I’m the prison-service authority on three-volume novels about intelligent, masochistic women who perversely marry the young man or no man at all; you know, Portrait of a Lady, Middlemarch, The Small House at Allington.”

  Philippa asked: “Weren’t the books spoilt for you, reading them in prison?”

  “No, because, while I was reading them, I wasn’t in prison. Middlemarch kept me sane for six weeks. There are eighty-six chapters and I rationed myself to two a day.”

  Middlemarch was first published in 1871. They would have hanged her mother then, but not in public. Surely public executions were stopped three years earlier. Maurice would know. She said: “I don’t think I’d have had that amount of self-control. Middlemarch is a marvellous novel.”

  “Yes, but it would be more marvellous if the sexual conventions had let George Eliot be more honest. A novel must be flawed if one of its main themes is the story of a marriage and we can’t even be told whether the marriage is consummated. Do you think Casaubon was impotent?”