Robert is out of my view, but I am blindly calculating the relationship between his speed and your position. Twenty feet away. Ten. The screech of a faraway horn makes me jump and look behind me. You walk on, in the opposite direction from Robert, never actually crossing his path.
ROBERT CAUGHT UP to her in the foyer, smiling as they put their things onto the X-ray machine belt and chatted together to the guards, who were now like old friends and could barely bring themselves to pass the wand over them, despite the stance of polite readiness they both took up after passing through the metal detector’s arch. She acted as if everything was as normal as it could be, hoping Robert wouldn’t notice that her face was too flushed and her breathing too fast.
CLARISSA PRESSED THE top of her mechanical pencil several times to extract more lead.
Mr. Morden was asking an old lady with white hair about something that had happened one hour before Lottie was kidnapped.
“Four men invaded my garden. One of them was kicking my kitchen door. Another shouted at the upstairs window that they’d seen my daughter Dorcas through her bedroom curtains and he knew she was there and could hear him and she’d better come out or they’d break in and get her and that would be worse for her. He said she should have learned that lesson already. He used nasty words.”
“Can you repeat for the jury what the words were?”
“I don’t use those words.”
Mr. Morden appeared suitably chastened but also faintly amused.
“One of them saw me with the phone in my hand, calling the police, and they ran off.
“That door hasn’t closed properly ever since,” she said.
THE SNOW FELL softly as Clarissa and Robert went through the revolving doors at the end of the day. There was no sign of Rafe.
“I wish I could fix that old lady’s door for her,” Robert said.
“You want to help people even when you’re off duty.”
“You’re right about me. I saved a snail from a thrush last weekend. The thrush was dashing it against a stone to try to break its shell.”
“Poor thrush,” Clarissa said. “It was so clever, a tool user, and now it’s probably starved to death.”
“I’d do the same thing again.” He nodded to confirm it.
But they both smiled, as if each of them liked the other for their difference.
They’d only got as far as the bridge when a voice interrupted. “Fireman. Hey. Fireman.”
The voice sounded nothing like Rafe’s, but she still caught her breath for an instant. She stood aside as a young man set himself in front of Robert. “You talked to my sixth form in December about road safety.” The reminder had the air of a challenge.
“I remember you. You came and chatted to me after. Sharif, isn’t it? Live with your grandmother.” Robert planted his feet more firmly, looked at the boy in his direct way, and waited patiently. She was amazed that he could recall all of this a couple months later, after one meeting, in what must have been a large room full of schoolkids.
“I thought about what you said, all those slides you showed. I’m still gonna drive fast.”
“I’ll cut you out alive or dead,” Robert said.
Clarissa felt a chill, imagining Robert’s hands, indifferent, wielding huge instruments, hacking through wrecked metal so the paramedics could get to the human meat tangled inside it.
“Makes no difference to me,” Robert said.
Sharif bit his lip.
“Might make a difference to your grandmother, though.” Robert put out his hand. Sharif shook it. “Thanks for stopping me to chat again and letting me know about your plans.”
Clarissa aimed a good-bye nod at Sharif, knowing he wouldn’t return it, and she and Robert walked on. “Does it really make no difference to you if they’re alive or dead?”
“None at all.”
“What if it were someone you knew?”
“Depends who.”
She smiled but felt another chill. “What if it were me?”
“That would make a difference.”
Tuesday, February 17, 6:20 p.m.
A small rectangular package is propped against the door of my building, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. My name is written by hand in carefully controlled calligraphy. But I know your writing in any guise. My heart pumps harder as I carry it up the stairs to my flat. I drop my bag, not bothering to take off my coat, and fall onto the sofa, pushing aside the string and stripping away the wrapping with shaking hands.
It is as I guess: a miniaturized book about the height and width of a typical postcard. You cut the pages to size by hand out of thick, expensive cream paper. You bound it by hand, too, with heavy thread that you stitched tightly through the holes you cut. It is a beautiful thing. I would admire such an object if you hadn’t made it.
A Collection of Four Fairy Tales, Selected by Rafe Solmes, the cover says, and below the title, Limited Edition: Number 1 of 1. There is a dedication: For Clarissa, who is beautiful and likes wine. I look at the contents page. I know every one of these stories all too well. First comes “The Castle of Murder.” Second comes “Blue Beard.”
I open the book to the third of your sequences, “Fitcher’s Bird,” and see that you have underlined a passage.
There was once a wizard who used to take the form of a poor man, and went to houses and begged, and caught pretty girls. No one knew whither he carried them, for they were never seen more.
It is the story of sex crime and murder, repeated and patterned. He has his “type,” too, his victim profile. The targets are young and beautiful, of course. Why else would he be interested in them? It is the story of lovely maidens who disappear mysteriously, as so many fairy tales are, and the titillating question of what happens to them after that blink of an eye when they vanish so completely out of their everyday lives. It is his pretense of vulnerability that allows him to capture them. It is their compassion for a seemingly poor man that makes them susceptible.
All of this, wrapped up in two sentences. The fairy tales set out the template and methods long before any infamous twentieth-century serial killer snatched his first victim.
The fake sling or pretend crutches. The practiced sighs of embarrassment and bravely fought pain as he struggles to load the groceries or box of books into his windowless van. Playing on the woman’s kindness and pity as she walks by. Playing on her romantic hopes, too, as she approaches the handsome stranger and offers to help. Perhaps she even wonders if the next moment will become a story for future children about how their parents met. Perhaps she even thinks of those other stories, the ones that promise good deeds will always be rewarded. He doubles the dose of charm, of course, and flashes that beautiful smile again just before he shoves her in, slams the door, and slaps the chloroform-soaked rag over her face.
I turn to the fourth and last of your stories, “The Robber Bridegroom,” where you have again highlighted the passage you want me to notice above all.
They dragged with them another young girl. They were drunk, and paid no heed to her screams and lamentations. They gave her wine to drink, three glasses full, one glass of white wine, one glass of red, and a glass of yellow, and with this her heart burst in twain. Thereupon they tore off her delicate raiment, laid her on a table, cut her beautiful body in pieces and strewed salt thereon.
A young woman is drugged, stripped, displayed upon a flat surface, and tortured. That is how the sequence goes. Her screams and pleas only make it more exciting; they show that she cannot close her eyes to the terrible new world she has fallen into. They make clear the kind of story it actually is. Sex crime disguised as fairy tale. Sex disguised as cannibalism. Sexual sadism disguised as meat preparation. Gang rape disguised as a band of robbers. That’s how the Grimms got it past their censors, who were not careful readers. The burst heart is not literal. It is not a story of necrophilia. She is not dead before these things are done to her. She is distraught and aware and in terror as they are being done. That is wh
at the burst heart means.
I know how you read these stories, and how you want me to read them. I see how you’ve linked me to the horrifying things these girls suffer, their dreadful fates, in your dedication.
I remember Mr. Morden saying in his opening speech that what happened to Lottie was no fairy tale. But he was wrong. What happened to her was right out of the fairy tales.
Even before I ever set foot in that courtroom, I’d known how important evidence was. My impulse, still, is to be rid of anything you’ve touched, not to have it poisoning the air around me. I want to minimize your presence—in my mind and in my flat. But it’s not an impulse I can give in to.
When it comes to the police, the leaflets are impossibly contradictory.
Call the police immediately—Don’t call the police until you have irrefutable proof.
The police are there to help—Don’t expect the police to be able to do very much.
When it comes to evidence, though, the advice is unanimous: I can’t have too much; I can easily have too little.
I need more evidence—so much evidence the police cannot possibly doubt me or ignore me. So much evidence that they can never make me look as they’ve made Lottie look.
I pull open my father’s beautiful cupboard. I shove your book and its wrappings toward the back, near your other things. I am careful to bury it all behind piles of stashed fabric. I slam the doors shut so hard I make myself jump. I wash my hands, not wanting a crumb of your DNA on my skin, transferred by touching what you have touched.
I swallow two tablets and climb into bed. Transformations is in my hands, but I only read a few pages before the knockout drops carry me away.
When I wake the next morning, the book is open on my chest. The words have seeped beneath my skin and into my blood. I cannot stop thinking of Sexton’s “Briar Rose.” Nothing can heal her from the things that were done while she was trapped in the dark. She is haunted into a terror of closing her eyes even after the prince’s kiss rescues her from the nightmare of that hundred-year sleeping spell.
Wednesday
SHE WANDERED THROUGH the outside market. She didn’t want to rush into the court building to hide before the day had even begun.
With Annie’s commands about iron in mind, she bought some organic stewing steak. She’d make a casserole over the weekend, using her mother’s recipe. She visited the vegetable woman for leeks and carrots and sprouts and parsnips and strong onions. She bought a bottle of red wine, too. She wasn’t going to stop cooking with wine, or stop drinking it, because of that story. It was pale wine that she’d drunk that November night, and that she now had an unconquerable aversion to. But she needed to tell herself that red was safe. She needed to believe that. There still had to be some safe things.
She packed it all up in a tote that she’d sewn in less than an hour with a beautiful fabric in blocks of crayon-like charcoals and blues. The groceries would be fine in the locker all day. The market would be all but gone if she waited until after court to do her shopping, and she didn’t want to miss the chance of a walk with Robert that evening. She wouldn’t let Rafe steal that from her.
He was stealing enough already. She paused for a minute to type furiously into her phone, answering an email from Caroline, a work friend who was secretary to the Vice Chancellor. Caroline had wondered if Clarissa wanted to meet for lunch on Saturday. Though Clarissa doubted that Rafe had much to do with Caroline, she couldn’t risk it. So she sent a polite excuse, her expression of disappointment more genuine than Caroline could have guessed.
She slipped her phone back into her bag and looked up. A man with a football supporter’s scarf around his neck was laughing with a stallholder. He handed over money, took his coffee, then sensed Clarissa’s close observation and turned. Their eyes met; she saw recognition in his, though his face was impassive. A voice made her break Mr. Morden’s gaze.
“Good morning, Clarissa.” Robert was standing beside her. “I made you jump. I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said. “No you didn’t.” She waved her nearly empty paper cup. “Too much coffee already, that’s all.” She didn’t say that her need for coffee was growing in proportion to her increased use of sleeping pills.
“I had a dream about you last night.” He added hastily, “Nothing bad. I can’t remember it. Just that you were there.”
“I hope the defendants weren’t,” she said.
“Definitely not.” He smiled. “I think it must be all the time we spend together.”
She nodded agreement. “I’m probably dreaming of you, too,” she said, “but forgetting by the time I wake up.”
“That’s for the best,” he said, closing the subject.
“It was funny, running into that boy with you yesterday. He didn’t know your name. Just ‘Fireman, hey, fireman.’ It made me see what a huge part of your identity that must be. Is it strange for you not to be that while you’re here?”
He laughed. “It’s great.”
They paused in front of the grand, mock-Renaissance building that now housed a bank but looked like it belonged in Venice.
“I was also thinking what an other world that fire station must be. But like a kind of second home to you, too.”
“You don’t get much sleep there when you’re on nights.”
They rounded the corner, side by side, navigating themselves around the queue spilling out of the sandwich and coffee shop.
“When you sleep at the station, are you not sure where you are when you wake?”
“I always know where I am.”
She gazed at him as if he were a magician who’d told her of an extraordinary trick and she didn’t doubt he could do it. “Do you have a favorite place in it?”
“The drying room. It’s where the dummies hang. They’re full of sand, different weights. God, some of those bad boys are heavy. They get splashed, and we have to save them.”
“Do they swing slightly? The dummies? I imagine they do.”
They were waiting for the custodial services vans to turn into the underground passage that led beneath the court building.
“The dummies are still. I like to read in there. It’s peaceful.”
“What do you read?”
He hesitated. “Poems.”
“What poems?” She was deeply interested, and a little surprised.
“Keats especially. I like Keats.”
Once, she’d noticed him holding a paperback thriller—an airport-type spy book with an image of an imperiled woman clinging to the gun-pointing hero. About as far away from Keats as it was possible to be. But she wasn’t being fair to him. Rafe had made her too suspicious of people. She herself read thrillers as well as poetry, and it hardly made her a serial killer. Why shouldn’t Robert read lots of different kinds of things, too?
She thought of Henry. Henry did not like Romanticism. He thought poems should be about contemporary economic and social and political issues. Henry wrote about negative equity and polluted landscapes and butter mountains. He played clever word games. He impressed her, but she did not love his poems. They were ceaselessly ambitious, as he was.
“I love Keats, too,” she said. And then, “So it’s a reading room as well as a drying room.”
He grinned. “And a talking room. Firemen like to talk. You get a new boy—maybe it’s his first death. You need to talk him through it.”
“That’s an important thing to do. One of those rare, difference-making things.”
He shrugged it off. “The drying room’s the warmest room in the station. We drink tea in there in winter. Sometimes I go there to be alone. Or I take one of the young pups in there, get him to practice knots. You need to be able to tie knots without looking, quickly, without thinking about it.” He moved his hands decisively, as if the rope were between his fingers.
The vans had long since disappeared underground. They walked on again, both of them flushed. They were at the revolving doors, then through security and putting things into lockers
and on their way up to Court 12. The fun was over.
WHEN CLARISSA SAT down in the jury box, Mr. Morden studied her and Robert for a few seconds, then turned to his next witness. She was delicately boned and slight, with long black hair.
Three months before Lottie’s kidnapping, when Clarissa was still weeping over the failure of IVF number three, Polly Horton had been heavily pregnant. If she’d run into Polly, her face serene and complacent over her bump, Clarissa would have had to look away.
Polly had been at the farmers’ market when Thomas Godfrey approached her. “When I saw it was Godfrey, I was so scared. Elias—my partner—owed them money. Godfrey said, ‘You’re coming with me to London.’ ”
“Did you want to go with that man to London?”
“I did not. Godfrey encircled me with his arm, to stop me moving away.” She stretched her arm in a curve. “Like this.”
Godfrey shook his head in ominous denial; he seemed to want to threaten her telepathically through the blue screen. Mr. Harker turned and frowned at him.
“I started to cry. A man asked if I was okay. Godfrey said, ‘Mind your own fucking business,’ but he ran off. If that man hadn’t intervened”—she wiped away a tear—“I’m sure Godfrey would have forced me to go with him.”
What Clarissa heard above all else was that Polly went to the police but Godfrey was never interviewed, let alone charged. What she inferred above all else was that attempted kidnapping could not be proved, even with a witness. She was unsure whether Court 12 was educating her or paralyzing her. Perhaps it was doing both.
Mr. Harker stood to defend Godfrey. “Explain to the court, please, why you have a conviction for the possession of heroin and crack cocaine, for which you received a one-year suspended sentence.”
“They weren’t my drugs,” Polly whispered. “I didn’t want Elias to go to prison.”
“You took the rap for your boyfriend. You will go to any lengths to protect him and try to deflect attention from his drug-related crimes. Including slandering an innocent man. Mr. Godfrey had no motive to kidnap you. And it’s hardly credible, is it, that he would attempt to do so at a crowded farmers’ market in broad daylight?”
The Book of You: A Novel Page 13
