A Love Like Blood

by Marcus Sedgwick

  I went out to Saint-Germain, to the street where Verovkin had had his practice, and though my heart began to pound even at the end of the road, it was an unfounded fear. The little brass name plaques were still there, but Verovkin’s had gone. There were even four little holes and a rectangular patch of stone of a different colour where it had been, yet that strange nothing comforted me, let me know I was not imagining it all, because it meant he had moved on.

  I set out to find him, but I failed.

  All my searches came to naught and I had to return to Cambridge before Monday’s round of lectures.

  A week slipped by, a week more, and I sulked in an uneasy mood, downcast and angry at my impotence. I ghosted my way through my working day and every night I sat in a chair in my living room, staring at the hearth, though there was no fire lit, listening to the Third Programme and whatever it chose to broadcast into my home.

  I heard none of it. All I could hear and see in my mind were a series of voices and images, memories of Marian, and dreams of what might have become my life, had she not been killed. This state of affairs continued without an apparent end, until one night when I got home from work and found, at last, a reply to my letter to Marian’s mother.

  Slipping off my coat and shoes, I carried the letter into the kitchen, and tore it open.

  It was much shorter than the first one and, I felt, less friendly. I wondered if I had given some offence, but I put that aside, because Margery Fisher gave me the name of a Parisian cemetery.

  As I read the letter, I felt something warm tap my stockinged feet.

  I looked down, and saw that the toes of my brown sock were dark and wet, and for a moment I stood staring stupidly at them, until I saw another drop of blood fall. I turned my hands over and saw I had given myself a large paper cut along the side of the left ring finger. I must have done it as I opened the letter, and in my state of mind not even noticed.

  Another drop welled from the cut and slid down my wrist now that I had turned my hands over. I dropped the letter on the table and shoved my finger in my mouth, only now noticing that I was in pain.

  With my finger still in my mouth I went to the cupboard under the stairs and awkwardly, with my right hand, fished out the box where I kept first aid; and as I did so I sucked the blood.

  I remembered something we’d been told when I was a medical student, that the taste of blood – that supposedly metallic taste – only arises when blood comes into contact with skin, as an oxidation reaction occurs between the fats of the skin and the iron in blood. What then is the natural taste of blood? our lecturer had put to us, telling us it would be different, and I remember darkly wondering how he knew, because who has drunk enough blood to be free of that metallic reaction with the skin?

  A strange thing, though, I thought, as I moved back into the kitchen with the first-aid shoebox: why are we happy to taste our own blood, when other bodily fluids we do not rush to taste? And yet to Dante, so Hunter and Marian had told me, these other fluids – mother’s milk, to nourish the newborn; semen, the seed that creates the newborn in the first place – were but the various distillations of that one divine substance, sangue perfetto. Blood was at the heart of it all. At least for Dante, and Aristotle, the source of his theories.

  But it made me think: who has not put their finger to their mouth and tasted it? I remembered that as a boy I used to have a lot of what I would describe to a colleague as epistaxis, but which to me, at the time, were nosebleeds, prolonged and heavy. I would lie on my back while my mother slid a key down my neck to draw the blood away. I think even then I doubted if that was doing any good, but meanwhile I would press a flannel to my nose and wait until the bleeding had stopped, pulling it away to reveal a clotted nose and a white facecloth drenched in red. I must have tasted a lot of my own blood then, but I couldn’t remember what it tasted like.

  All these thoughts rumbled along in my mind while I fiddled with the plasters in the shoebox, fumbling with my right hand to find and place a sticking plaster on my left ring finger. Being left-handed, it was my clumsy right that was given the job, and I botched it the first time, and the second. Trying for a third time, my eye fell on Margery’s letter again, and I saw I had dropped it face down on the table, and that it continued on the back.

  I saw one word and stopped what I was trying to do with the plaster and my bleeding hand. All thought of that was gone as I saw that one word: beast. I must have stared at the paper as if the words upon it were on fire.

  I snatched it up again, and I read that Marian had been found, murdered, it was thought, by a killer who had struck before in the area, and whom the press had dubbed ‘the Beast of Saint-Germain’.

  Margery said little more than that, and I could see my letter had dragged up old sufferings. Hunter had been right, and I felt awful, but I didn’t regret what I’d done, because it had given me two pieces of information I needed desperately.

  Firstly, I knew that Jean, the barman, had lied to me. He had told me Marian had a weak heart, and had been obliged to go home to the States. Why had he done that? The only, the obvious, conclusion was that he was known to Verovkin, was an ally of his, and I decided that I would perhaps do better to pick up his trail than that of the elusive margrave.

  And secondly, I knew where Marian was buried, and I wanted that so much because I wanted to be close to her again. Even just once, though she had been dead under the grass for ten years, because I knew now that she’d been taken. She had not gone naturally into death. She had been taken, against her will, and with horrible violence.

  Anger suddenly poured out of me, rising from nowhere so that I cried out and swept the back of my left hand across the table, smashing the shoebox, sending it flying across the room to the kitchen wall, where it scattered its contents on the floor. I hung my head and looked at the mess I’d made, not failing to see the drops of my own blood that had splattered the white wall.

  I stood waiting for the anger to subside and of course it did, but it did not disappear altogether. Rather it turned into a sort of determination, so that three weeks later I grimly found my way to Paris again.

  I located Marian’s grave, I stood in front of it, and I wept. I hunted in the libraries and found old newspaper cuttings of her death, as well as of two others reported to be the work of la Bête. And I made a nuisance of myself in Saint-Germain itself, asking around, being nosy, accosting anyone who would listen to me, and so it was that one day I had a conversation with an old working man, a local odd-job man, who told me that around eight or nine years ago, he couldn’t remember, he had been paid five hundred old francs to shift boxes from the petit palais at the end of the park on to a small camion. He told me that although no one had told him where the boxes were heading, he had heard the drivers moaning that it would take three days to drive to Avignon.

  So I had it. He was in Avignon.

  Chapter 4

  I arrived in Avignon in August 1961, having had to wait until I could take more leave without raising too many eyebrows. I had tried to take a sleeper from Paris, but not having booked, I had to wait a night and take two trains to Avignon the following day. The evening I spent in Paris I was anxious and restless. I had no business there any more. I had taken all I needed from it, and I had paid my respects to Marian at her graveside.

  She was buried in Montmartre, just a short walk from where she had lived. It had taken me three hours to find her grave the first time I went, but this time I walked straight to it: a small plot with a simple but decent headstone, which simply gave her name and her dates. It spoke of nothing more. It gave no hint of the horror of her death, of how she had been stabbed repeatedly, at least seventeen times according to the extract from her post-mortem, large sections of which had been faithfully reprinted in Le Figaro. I’d read that article again and again, awful though it was, because it was the last mention of Marian in the world that I had, not counting her mother’s letter. Though it was torture to do so, therefore, I pored over it many times
, even forcing myself to reread the description of the state of her body; the mass of stabbings, both in her body and in her face. Her face. I felt sick as I read that, but there was worse to come. The surgeon who conducted the autopsy had concluded that the murderer had inflicted these wounds with a knife, but not a particularly sharp one. He guessed it was something like a table knife. Aside from the wounds, her body displayed the marks of teeth on the shoulder, neck and breasts. He had bitten her. He had torn her skin, deeply. Finally the report spoke of the mutilation of her breasts and genitals with the knife. Interestingly – that was how the paper put it – there was no sign of sexual assault. How they could not consider that mutilation of the genitals was not a sexual assault, I was at a loss to understand. I supposed they meant there was no sign of him on her, his semen. That he had not actually raped her.

  Interestingly.

  Every time I read that word, I wanted to march into the offices of the paper, cause some terrible atrocity, and ask them if they found it interesting. Why is it, I wanted to ask them, why is it that with some dreadful crime, a brutal killing like this, that the newspapers feel they need to make every explicit detail a thing of public record? Why not leave these things unspoken, why not leave them to the bereaved, these things that should remain private? Something vaguely connected in my mind: reading these gruesome details, I felt as I had when I stood in the operating theatre in Trumpington Street; as if I was seeing something I shouldn’t see. Blood, like the physical act of love, like murder.

  So why expose these things? The answer, I can see now, is money, but at the time I was too full of rage to see so clearly and it made me want to storm their offices.

  But I didn’t, of course, and anyway, I knew where the source of my anger really lay. It lay in Avignon.

  In Paris, I considered going to the Sûreté with what I knew, but I hesitated, because, after all, what did I know? Nothing, really. A name, and with that name a link to an act of horror I’d seen during a time of general horror. I would be throwing wild accusations around, and I knew it. I wondered if I was doing the right thing, but I must have walked past a half-dozen police stations in Paris that day, and entered none of them.

  I stood at Marian’s grave, and I wept angry tears, and found that it did not help to do so. I stared at the earth, trying to stop myself from picturing what was underneath, and wondered if that was why Marian’s father, rich though he was, had not wanted to bring her body home. What was there, in that dark soil, that was worth bringing home? I imagined that was what he’d said to Margery. I imagined them arguing about it, and in the end the grieving mother must have done all she could just to get him to pay for a respectable headstone in a corner of Montmartre.

  As I stood at her grave, terrible images surged into my mind, unbidden and unwelcome, as I saw him attacking her, cutting her, biting her, ruining her. I tried to force them out, tried to find peace by remembering Marian’s face as I had known her, but though I attempted to paint a picture of her, I could not manage to do so. I knew I had constructed no more than a caricature of her; that I couldn’t really see her any more in my mind; that she’d gone. In her place was only the evidence of my eyes – the letters cut in the stone in front of me.

  That evening, the evening before I left Paris for the south, I ate in a small bistro just down from the cemetery. I ordered almost without thinking, some food, some wine. I sat in a corner and watched the customers come and go, watched the two young waiters and one waitress go about their evening’s work quickly and professionally. My waiter brought my food; I ordered some more wine, watching a little performance between the waitress and two old Parisian gentlemen. I watched, not even really able to hear the words, the ritual they enacted. The bringing of the food, the noises of delight and gratitude from the men. The waitress, inclining her head, do you need anything else? The glance between the men, old friends presumably, no, nothing, thank you. We have everything we need. The smallest curtsey from the waitress, thank you gentlemen.

  It struck me as a small mime show, one that would be repeated this evening in Paris alone many thousands of times.

  But there was something further that interested me, and it was a story even older than that of food: it was one of lust. I saw the way the old men looked at the girl when she wasn’t looking. As her eyes turned to one man, his friend would take his chance to stare at her. She was pretty enough, perhaps that was why they gazed. Then I realised that she wasn’t pretty, not really. What she was, was young, a thing so often mistaken for beauty. Her skin was pale and smooth, her eyes bright, her lips red, and her hair was, in fairness, spectacular, a mass of blonde curls.

  Perhaps it was just habit that made these men in their seventies look at her cleavage, and at her bottom when she left them. Perhaps they genuinely harboured desire for her. As she returned to enquire how their food was, I saw one of them take his chance to steal another look at her, but this time he looked not at her breasts, but at her neck. The carotid, I noticed, pulsed slightly, and the man had seen this. She turned to him and he smiled into her eyes instead.

  She smiled back, and was gone again.

  I stayed a long time in the restaurant, picking slowly at my food, drinking more wine than I should have. Eventually, the waitress came over to me and looked at my plate.

  ‘Ce n’est pas bon?’ she asked, seriously concerned.

  ‘Si, si, c’est très bon. Mais je n’ai pas faim.’

  I smiled, but I could see she wasn’t convinced, and I felt the need to offer her, and therefore the unseen chef, some further encouragement. In stuttering French I tried to explain that it was very delicious, and that I liked the sauce in particular. Only now did I notice what I was eating: coq au vin.

  Now she smiled, broadly, and I knew I had done the right thing. ‘Oh, c’est le sang qui donne ce bon goût à la sauce; il la rend beaucoup plus riche. C’est le secret du chef.’

  She winked at me as if to show that this was a secret she regularly shared, and I kept the smile on my face until she’d gone, then pushed the plate away from me.

  Le sang? It was the blood that made the sauce rich. What little hunger I’d had vanished. I quickly swallowed a lot of wine and staggered into the hot night.

  So the following day, when I arrived in Avignon, my mind was already cloudy with dark thoughts, with words from the article about Marian’s death, which I continued to play in my head like a tape recording with the accounts of the two other murders in the district around the same time, all presumed to be the work of the same hand.

  I had booked a hotel with a travel agent in Paris. I took a taxi from the station, and found myself being driven across the river, out of the city. My hotel turned out to be across the Rhône, in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, not the city itself, but a small town directly facing it.

  The Hôtel du Rhône was a crammed and squalid place; the room was tiny and didn’t look at the river but at a train line and a brick wall. It was unbearably hot, with a window that barely opened, so as soon as I’d dumped my old holdall on the bed, I set out for the city itself.

  I didn’t feel like I was in France any longer, it felt far too sultry and southern to me, as if I’d crossed the border into Spain, though I had never been there either. It was dusk. A strong and hot wind blew into my face as I crossed the river towards the city, so warm and dry it almost made me gag.

  The city seemed to have an almost perfectly intact wall, medieval I supposed, and the whole skyline inside was dominated by the crenellations of some large castle or palace, the towers of a cathedral.

  The sun set behind me as I crossed by a new suspension bridge, seeing to my left a massive old fortified bridge that ran halfway across the river, then stopped, and I knew it must be the one from the nursery rhyme I’d sung as a boy.

  L’on y danse tous en rond . . .

  Everyone dances in circles. I had never understood why, what that meant, until that point. The bridge, or half of it, must have collapsed or been destroyed at some time, making it
a road that went nowhere, only to the seemingly furious waters of the Rhône below, leaving its passengers to dance in circles. Maybe I was imagining all that, but I could see them anyway, figures dancing, swaying, swinging perilously near to the waters.

  I reached the end of my bridge, and stopped.

  For a brief moment, I wondered what on earth I was doing. It was no longer a fantasy, finding this man. It had become real, here and now, in Avignon, and I was about to enter the city where I believed him to be hiding. If I had any second thoughts, now was the time to pay them heed. But that only lasted for a second, because I knew what I was doing, and why; I had no second thoughts.

  I was going to find Marian’s killer.

  It was the how that worried me, not the why.

  Not then.

  Chapter 5

  That first evening in Avignon overwhelmed me.

  I have tried to work out what it was about the city that disturbed me so, but right from the very start, as I passed through the old walls, I felt unsettled. It sounds melodramatic to say I felt as if I was entering a giant beast of some kind, but that is the first impression I had – of walking into a living, breathing monster, one that had streets for veins and buildings for organs. I think, too, that I had the immediate sense that I did not belong. That I was a transgressor. Not just because I was English, and pale, when almost everyone around me was speaking French and bore tanned skin. It was something more than that; it was because I could not understand why I was the only one who seemed to feel the oppression and imminent violence of the place. I couldn’t understand why everyone else was strolling, smiling, eating, joking, flirting and enjoying themselves, when it seemed apparent that a storm would break at any moment.