A Love Like Blood

by Marcus Sedgwick

  He looked at me.

  Still, there was the possibility that this was coincidence.

  Then the guard’s whistle blew, and just as it did, I stepped back on to the train, and even in the dark of the poorly lit platform, I could see the eyes of the man as he climbed swiftly aboard.

  It began to move, and now there was no doubt.

  It was only a few minutes from Morar to Mallaig, and yet it was an agonising wait as I sat by the door to the outside, my eyes on the corridor in the direction he would come.

  As the train rumbled on, I started to doubt that he was going to make his move, and as we pulled into Mallaig I could see he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and I knew he was going to follow me out of the station.

  It was around ten, a late December night. Mallaig was deserted.

  The cottage I was renting was a good walk away, a couple of twisting miles along the southern shore of Loch Nevis, which usually took me at least forty minutes.

  I was afraid. I had formed no plan, beyond calling at the police station and banging on the door and demanding to be let in until the murderer following me got bored and left. The idea was ludicrous, and I knew I was on my own. I’d thought about what I had in the cottage, and knew I could leave it all without returning. I had bought a few clothes, some books. I had some money there. I had much more elsewhere, and the few thousand pounds in cash in the cottage could be lost easily enough. There was nothing I could not leave behind, just as I had left more precious, more valuable things in my house in Hills Road without a second moment’s thought.

  It was time to move on again, I could see, but first I had to get away from the man behind me.

  It was a cold night, and as I leaped from the train and began to walk briskly out of the station a bitter wet wind welcomed me. I tried to glance behind me as I walked around the side of the station and was pleased to see I had a good head start on him.

  Walking several miles a day had made me fit, and I used my speed to put more space between us. I turned from Station Road, not heading down the bay road as usual, but up on to Annie’s Brae.

  Beyond the town it was always pitch-black at night and so I took a torch, but I didn’t use it this time. Instead, as I passed the last few houses, I saw a chance. I looked behind me. I couldn’t see him, but I knew that didn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t see me. There was nothing else to do, so I slipped around a small outcrop of rock that the road to the headland cut through, and waited.

  Above the noise of the wind, I only heard his footsteps at the last moment. For a second I thought my plan had worked and he had walked on, but somehow he seemed to know what I’d done, and was turning to me in the darkness before I realised what was happening.

  I saw his arm out in front of him as if he was holding a knife in his hand. He was right on top of me and I flung myself out of the dark crevice I was hiding in, and wrestled with him.

  I wasn’t even thinking as I pushed him away, and he stumbled back over the short drop to the beach.

  It wasn’t far, maybe just ten feet, but he landed on rocks. I heard the air come out of him as he fell and I heard something crack.

  I began to run back to Mallaig, but I stopped. There was no sound from behind me. Cautiously I picked my way back up the short steep slope and peered over. I could see nothing. There was no sound but the wind, and the waves on the shore.

  I stared long into the darkness and then saw the headlights of a car climbing out of Mallaig.

  Scrambling down, I hid as the car passed, and then felt my way in the dark to where I thought the man had fallen.

  I stepped on something soft and, recoiling, I crouched.

  It was him. His neck was broken, and he had died instantly.

  Something made me want to search him; I suppose I wanted to know my enemy. In the darkness I fumbled through his pockets and found a wallet, a bunch of keys, and nothing else.

  I felt wetness on my hands.

  The wetness was warm. I pulled the torch from my pocket and dared to flash it on briefly, and saw that his blood was all over me. My hands, my clothes. I saw the back of his head, and the hole in it, and with morbid horror, I knew where the blood had come from.

  I stared at him for a moment more, but I cannot really say I was thinking what to do. I just did it.

  I switched off the torch, then felt down and fumbled for his wrists, and began to haul him backwards across the rocks. I had to lift his body at times; at others I was able to let it roll a foot or two, when it would smash into more stones.

  It took me for ever to get him to the sea, and then I pulled him as far out as I could wade, until I was so frozen and in danger of being swept away myself that I abandoned his body.

  As I staggered from the sea I tried to wash the blood from my hands, but in the dark had no way of knowing if I was successful.

  I was just climbing away from the site of the fall when I kicked something and heard the clink of metal on stone.

  He’d had that knife in his hands.

  I risked the torch once more and it didn’t take me long to find the thing, but it wasn’t a knife, it was a gun. A revolver.

  I put it in my pocket, and then headed back to my cottage, half walking, half running through the town, only slowing when I reached the end of the bay road and climbed out past the last houses.

  My place slowed, and I began to shiver. I was soaked through to the skin as high as my waist, the night was cold and then the rain came down, hard.

  I think I was on the verge of hypothermia as I finally made it into my cottage around 11 o’clock.

  I pulled off my wet clothes, and wrapped a blanket around me until I felt warmer. I struggled to light the fire I’d laid before I’d set out, using almost half a box of matches in my clumsiness. I drank a glass of whisky and then took another long swig from the bottle, which I clutched as I rocked backwards and forwards on a chair in front of the fire, waiting to get warm.

  I stared into the flames for a long time as it slowly dawned on me that I’d just killed someone, something I’d never done as a soldier.

  Then I remembered that I’d taken his wallet and, still wound up tight in the blanket, I reached for my coat and pulled the fat fold of leather from the pocket.

  Along with twenty pounds in cash there were a few slips of paper, and a small bunch of business cards. In fact, five copies of the same business card. His business card.

  The name on it read Douglas M. Hayes, and only then did I realise that I’d killed my private detective.

  I dropped the cards on the floor, staring at them in horror, motionless for a minute.

  Then I picked them all up, and the wallet and the money, and dropped the lot into the fire, where I watched them smoulder and burn till they were just a foul black crisp.

  Chapter 5

  Was it my father who’d warned me about private detectives?

  Whoever it was, they had been right.

  There was nothing to suggest that Hayes’ intentions towards me had been anything other than bad. He had not introduced himself, but had followed me to the wild Scottish coast with a gun in his hand. It was an old service revolver, and I guessed that maybe he’d been a young officer in the war, or that he’d snaffled the weapon when he’d demobbed, as many people had. Whatever, he must have decided that I was worth blackmailing, or robbing; somehow he had found out something about me, about who I really was, and decided I was a softer target than Verovkin. Or perhaps it was simply the carefree way I’d doubled and redoubled his fee that had made him think I was a fat target.

  He’d hung about in Glasgow till he saw me collect my mail from the post-office box, and trailed me.

  All these thoughts, however, were secondary to something much more shocking: I had killed someone.

  For a day or two I wondered over my emotional state, which surprised me at first, because I felt nothing. I felt no remorse for what had happened. I decided there was more to it than that; I’d seen enough in the war to know th
at the way people react to death can vary enormously. Sometimes there is rage, sometimes there is grief, sometimes a terrible weakness, from fear, and sometimes, very often, there is simply an emptiness, a false kind of emptiness, which belies the fact that emotions are present but just lie hidden, very deep down.

  So I told myself that it was normal to feel this nothingness, and anyway, I also instinctively felt that what had happened to Hayes he’d brought on himself. Yet there remained an empty, aching depression inside me, which rose to the surface from time to time, whenever I thought about his blood by the torchlight.

  Suddenly I craved crowds, and noise. In Scotland I was exposed; there were so few people around that anyone looking for a stranger would have no trouble locating me sooner or later.

  It was time to leave.

  I’d paid my rent till the end of the following month, and I told my landlord I was moving to Ireland for a while.

  Then I took the train south and decided to lose myself in London instead, because though Verovkin had not had me followed to Mallaig, he could have been very close to doing so. Hayes hadn’t needed to know my real name in order to find me. The mere idea that my hideaway had been discovered by anyone was enough to scare me into running again.

  Another thought occurred to me then: supposing Hayes had found Verovkin? It was possible that he’d found him, and approached him, and then my enemy had put two and two together and realised that I was the one who’d sent a detective to find him. Instead of killing him, he’d turned him against me. I already knew that he was a very persuasive man, whether through money, or less obvious means.

  And if Hayes had traded sides, and had been working for Verovkin, then presumably he had passed on details of my whereabouts. The detail of why Hayes’ last letter had been typed bothered me; it had made me think Hayes had been killed by Verovkin, yet that had not been the case. Maybe it was all part of Verovkin’s manipulative game. Or maybe I’d been reading too much into what had been a chance decision on Hayes’ part, and it merely showed what a paranoid state of mind I had developed.

  Yet I knew one thing for a fact: Verovkin hadn’t killed Hayes, I had.

  I stopped a night in Glasgow and bought a smart suitcase and two sets of clothes, and then I boarded the London train, feeling jumpy all the time, thinking that Verovkin’s men were everywhere. Every man I passed seemed for a moment to be Jean, or his brother; I sought their faces everywhere but of course never found them, and only when my train arrived in London did I start to relax a little.

  London was wet and I was glad of it. The light was poor, the rain fell incessantly in sheets that made everyone keep their heads down as they hurried on, making no eye contact as they went. It suited me well.

  It was a few days before Christmas, and no time to be finding lodgings. I made a trip to the bank and withdrew a few thousand pounds, a vast fortune to some but which barely made a dent in my inheritance, and then I found a small but expensive hotel in Mayfair. I gave a false name and address on the register, a different name from the one I’d been using in Scotland, asked for a quiet room and hid myself away.

  The days ticked by. Christmas came and went and I moved hotels so as not to arouse any suspicion, and finally I decided I had to find cheap lodgings in a rough part of town, somewhere where people didn’t know each other and didn’t want to.

  At random I headed out into the city with my suitcase. The New Year had come and gone and it was still miserable weather. I found myself wandering the length of the Mile End Road and saw a card in a newsagent’s window offering a bedsit nearby.

  I went to see it immediately. It was on the third floor of a block overlooking the railway line and it was awful, but I took it, deciding I could move again whenever I wanted to.

  The landlord lived on the first floor, an original East End boy I guessed. He made no pretence of welcome or kindness, but I was glad of that. I discreetly peeled off a few weeks’ rent from one of the bundles of notes in my pocket, and counted them into his hand. He counted them again, then slunk away downstairs.

  What happened later that afternoon is for ever left in my memory when so much else has gone. I can see everything so clearly, without struggling to remember. I was hungry, and I had seen a café next to the newsagent’s back on the Mile End Road.

  I didn’t yet trust my landlord, or the lock on my door, so I hid as much money as I could, and the revolver, in the various pockets of my overcoat. This was before they brought back the £10 note, and carrying thousands of pounds in fivers was inconvenient; they filled a quarter of my suitcase, which I locked and shoved under the bed.

  I checked myself in the grimy mirror in the bathroom along the hallway from my room, and decided I didn’t look like I was a wealthy man, or even one worth pickpocketing, then headed back out into the rain.

  I ducked into the newsagent’s first and bought a copy of the Herald since anything else might be out of place and headed into the greasy spoon. I ordered tea and pie and mash and sat down to read my paper, and then I saw it.

  The headline said Murder in Academia. I didn’t even need to read more to know that somehow it was something to do with me, but I read. I read that Cambridge academic Hunter Wilson had been found murdered in his rooms in college on 2 January, but that his death was believed to have occurred some days, possibly even weeks, before that. With the university down for Christmas, it said, no one had been near Professor Wilson’s rooms until finally a cleaner had reported a bad smell in the stairway.

  I read how the murder was particularly brutal, and that a motive for the crime was unknown. I read that a bungled break-in was being considered as a possibility, as was the idea of a feud. Hunter Wilson, the paper said, was a well-known homosexual. It left those two unconnected ideas somehow connected, without justification or any shame at such blatant supposition.

  I read more. I read how police were eager to speak to a close friend of Professor Wilson’s, a doctor named Charles Jackson, who had not been seen for some time. It was thought that Dr Jackson and Professor Wilson had had a kind of falling-out, and that the former was now in either the Glasgow or London areas. A manhunt was in operation, taking in both those locations, and Cambridge too.

  I stood, or tried to, but my legs collapsed, and I made the other people in the café jerk their hawkish eyes towards me. The waitress was bringing my food, and I mumbled something about being sick and staggered out into the rain, but not before sending my tea flying across the dirty lino floor.

  There were shouts and I ignored them and pressed on, clutching the paper in my hand, walking faster and faster until I found myself running back to the bedsit, where I locked myself into my room and read the article again.

  Cambridge. And Glasgow and London.

  As I read all of the article for the first time, I knew why. They had my false name. The police must have seen my note to Hunter, and had published in the newspapers the false name I’d been using in Glasgow, though I’d been using a different one in Loch Nevis.

  And London? I had withdrawn enough money from my bank to buy a house just before Christmas. They would know that.

  A manhunt. A manhunt for me. The police were hunting me, and I knew Verovkin was pursuing me too, that he would be reading everything in the papers about me that I was.

  I knew immediately that I would not be able to touch my British bank accounts again, and possibly not those offshore either.

  I had the money in Geneva, which would be safe, but I would have to . . .

  Suddenly, my thoughts stopped, and the paper fell out of my hands. I stared at the dirty wall opposite me.

  Hunter was dead.

  Chapter 6

  It was no way to lose a friend, and no way to mourn him.

  I had dragged him into this. Not intentionally, but the result was the same. He was dead because I had been unable to let go, as he’d urged me to.

  Every day the papers produced more details of the crime, of the investigation. It lived briefly as a story that peopl
e gossiped about on the trains and the tubes, in cafés and at bus stops. Whenever I overheard such talk, I grew angry, but always managed to force myself to walk away, even to leave a meal untouched if need be, because if I accosted those people, I knew my rage would lead me into trouble.

  The police, said the papers, were hoping the errant Dr Jackson would be able to help them with their enquiries, and might be able to shed further light on a possible motive, as well as clear up the possibility that there had been an argument between the two men. One day I read that nothing had been taken from Professor Wilson’s rooms, the next that papers, valuable books and personal letters had been stolen.

  Had he read my note? He must have done.

  Why hadn’t he written back? I had no answer to that, save the obvious one. That he hadn’t wished to speak to me. But Hunter was not the type to bear a grudge, and once I’d stopped sulking with him, I couldn’t believe he would have stayed that way with me. More than anything else, it hurt that I didn’t know for sure if he had been angry with me, if he had no longer been my friend.

  One day, buying milk, I saw that they’d printed a photograph of me in the press. It was on the front of every national paper, and in fear I hurried home, convinced that everyone was staring at me, whispering and pointing.

  I didn’t come out of my room for three days, until hunger forced me out. In a café I saw a photo of a man in an old newspaper, and stared at it.

  Then I knew I was safe.

  I knew the man was me, but I no longer recognised him. The photograph they had of me was from some years ago, when I had not long graduated. I was clean-shaven, and had an eager look in my eyes. I was wearing a doctor’s white lab coat, and my hair was neatly parted. I looked as if I knew I was about to cure cancer. Smiling into the lens, smugly. Secure, confident. It didn’t look like me at all.