Caedmon’s Song

by Peter Robinson

  Police last night say they found the body of a nineteen-year-old female on a stretch of waste ground near the University of Sheffield. Evidence suggests that the girl, a student at the university, was killed shortly after dark on Friday evening. Detective Superintendent Elswick, in charge of the field investigation, told reporters that evidence indicates the unnamed woman is the sixth victim of the killer who has come to be called the ‘Student Slasher’. All his victims have been female students at northern universities. Police refused to reveal the exact nature of the girl’s injuries. The killer has been operating in the north for over a year now, and there has been much criticism of the police’s handling of the investigation. When asked why the killer hadn’t been caught yet, Superintendent Elswick declined to comment.

  Martha felt herself grow cold. The conversations going on around her turned to a meaningless background hum. All she could hear clearly was the litany of names running through her mind: Margaret Snell, Kathleen Shannon, Jane Pitcombe, Kim Waterford, Jill Sarsden. And now another, name unknown. Hands shaking, she lit another cigarette from the stub of her old one and read the article again. It said exactly the same, word for word. The ‘Student Slasher’ had struck again. She had been mistaken in Grimley. She had killed the wrong man.

  Choking back the vomit, she crushed out her cigarette, rushed to the tiny toilet and locked the door behind her. After bringing up her breakfast, she splashed icy water on her face and leaned against the sink breathing fast and deep. She still felt dizzy. Everything was spinning around her as if she was standing on a high balcony suffering from vertigo. Her skin felt cold and clammy; her mouth tasted dry and sour. She took a deep breath and held it. Another. Another. Her pulse began to steady.

  The wrong man, she thought, sitting down on the toilet and holding her head in her hands. And she had been so damn sure. The hoarse voice, the accent, the calloused hands, the low, dark fringe, the glittering eyes – it had all been right. So where did she go wrong? She couldn’t have been thinking clearly at all. It had already occurred to her that her original theory – that he was a fisherman – must have been wrong, but she had gone ahead anyway. Her search had been based on slender enough evidence from the start. Anyone else would have said that she was looking for a needle in a haystack and, what’s more, that she had no idea which haystack it was supposed to be in. But Martha had trusted her instincts. She had been sure that she would find him and that she would know him when she did. Well, so much for her bloody instincts.

  Looking back, she could see that she should have known, that her perception had been flawed. He was too young, for a start, and though the voice was close, certainly in accent, it was pitched lower and had less of a rasp. The eyes and hands were the same, but there had been no deeply etched lines on his face.

  How could she have let herself get carried away? This made her a murderer, pure and simple. There was no excuse. She remembered with a shudder his body twitching on the sand in the moonlight, the shattered bone and the sticky brain matter beneath her fingertips and the stifling sea-wrack smell of the cave. She had killed an innocent man. A man who would probably have forced himself on her eventually anyway, true – but an innocent man. And now she had to live with it.

  She got up, drank some water from the tap and washed her face. She looked pale, but not enough that people would really notice. Taking another deep breath, she unbolted the door and walked back to her table. She seemed steady enough on her feet. She hoped nobody in the cafe had seen the way she had panicked. Still, they would have no idea why. Her coffee had cooled down, but the cigarette, improperly stubbed out, still smouldered in the ashtray. The story in the folded paper stared up at her. She turned it over and looked out of the window. Holidaymakers drifted by like shades in limbo. ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’ she found herself thinking, but she couldn’t remember where the words came from.

  Should she call the hunt off, then, go back home to the shell of a life she had made for herself? No. Even now, at such a low point, she knew she must not do that. If she did, then it all came to nothing. Grimley would have died for nothing. Only if she fulfilled her purpose, set out to do what she had to, would any of it mean anything. She was still convinced she had got the right place: she would find her man in Whitby, or somewhere very close by. He was still here.

  She grieved for Jack Grimley, would do anything to undo what she had done. But, she reminded herself, this was a war of a kind, and in war there are no innocent bystanders. Grimley might have been a good person, but he was still a man. To Martha, all men were potentially the same as the one she sought. Grimley, given the chance, would have led her into one of those caves and tried to rip her clothes off and . . . It didn’t bear thinking about. Men were all the same, all violators and murderers of women. No doubt the real ‘Student Slasher’ was an ordinary, well-respected citizen on the outside. Maybe he even had a wife and children. But Martha didn’t care about that. She just wanted to kill him.

  Why did he travel inland so often? Was it just because that was where the universities were, or was it something to do with his work? She could no longer bank on his being a fisherman, after all, so maybe he was a travelling salesman based in Whitby. This was the kind of thing she had to do now – think again, plan again, act again. She couldn’t let herself get dragged down by one mistake, no matter how horrifying it was. She had simply been too eager, too sure of herself, too impatient. She would have to focus more clearly on the task ahead, bring her intellect into harmony with her instinct. So start by thinking, she told herself. He travels inland frequently. Why? There, at least, was something concrete, a place to start.

  ‘Anything else, love?’

  ‘What?’

  It was the waitress clearing away the empty table next to hers. ‘Another cup of coffee?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’ Her last one had gone cold, anyway, Martha remembered.

  ‘You stay there and I’ll bring it over, love. You’re looking a bit peaky. Had a shock?’

  Martha shook her head. ‘Thank you. No, no. Nothing serious.’ She would have to watch herself, she realized. It wouldn’t do at all if she went around town making a spectacle of herself. People would remember her.

  When the waitress had brought the coffee, Martha returned to her thoughts. She knew that Superintendent Elswick and his minions would be wasting their time trying to figure out the killer’s motives and come up with a psychological profile. It hadn’t got them very far yet, had it? But she didn’t give a damn about the man’s unhappy childhood or the time he’d been forced to kiss his dead grandmother. Maybe his mother had abandoned him and gone to university. Perhaps that was why he always attacked young female students. Perhaps he had a daughter who had been corrupted as a student. Or maybe he just thought university campuses were dens of iniquity, full of sluts and sex-crazed bitches, the kind of place he was most likely to find loose women – and liberated women, careless or foolish enough to walk home alone in the dark. Again, she didn’t care. When she found him she wasn’t going to psychoanalyse him. She was going to kill him. Simple as that.

  The rush of thoughts lifted Martha’s spirits. It proved that her mind was working clearly again and that she could harden herself against experience, as she had to. When she looked back on what she had done the other night, keeping the grotesque images at bay, she saw that there was good in it, too. It hadn’t really been a wasted effort at all. If she looked at it from a positive viewpoint, she could see killing Grimley as a kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing. A horrible thought, perhaps, but at least now she knew she could go through with it. Grimley’s murder had also been an initiation of a kind, a baptism in blood. She had killed once; therefore, she could kill again. Only next time, she thought, fingering the paperweight in her holdall, she would be certain to get it right.

  26

  KIRSTEN

  Kirsten remembered how she used to love the gossamer light in the woods, green and silver filaments dancing in the leaves, and
the way it shot through gaps in the foliage here and there and lit up clumps of bluebells or tiny forget-me-nots by the brook, making them seem like still-life paintings rather than living, growing plants.

  Today, though, she felt no elation as she trudged along the winding path under the high trees. After two days of hiding in her room, she had made the effort to go out – more for her parents’ sake than for her own. Her father was beginning to look even more haggard than ever, and her mother was getting more impatient by the minute. They were almost at their wits’ end with her, she knew. They wanted to tell her to put the unpleasantness behind her, stop moping and get on with her life. Only pity prevented them. They still felt sorry for her, and it was a sorrow they couldn’t give voice to. So she had come to the woods to get them off her back. If she pretended all was well, they wouldn’t know any different.

  And it had worked. As soon as she had come downstairs the previous evening, they had cheered up, offered her a drink and sat companionably watching television with her. That morning, her father had returned to work, albeit reluctantly, and her mother had said she was going to Wells to do some shopping, as Bath was getting far too shabby and touristy of late.

  But nature did nothing for Kirsten. As she walked, she remembered a passage from Coleridge’s ode ‘Dejection’:

  A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

  A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief.

  Which finds no natural outlet, no relief.

  In word, or sigh, or tear.

  Looking at the flowers in the light, she felt for Coleridge when he wrote, ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! . . . I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.’ Too true, Kirsten thought. The light that danced among the leaves could give her nothing, and her inner fountains had all dried up, had all been sucked through the dark star in her mind and turned to blood.

  There was no point going on. About halfway along her usual route, she turned around and headed back home. Her room was the best place to be, and the house would be quiet with everyone out. Maybe in a few weeks the emptiness and the pain would go away and she would find herself back to normal. Already, though, she was finding it hard to remember what normal was.

  Two black and white cows watched her with their big mournful eyes as she crossed the narrow stretch of grass between the woods and the back gate of the house. Her head still ached, and the depression suddenly gripped her more tightly than before.

  Back in the house, she wandered aimlessly from room to room for a while, thought of making a sandwich, then decided she wasn’t hungry. Getting drunk seemed like a good idea at first, but she had an even better one.

  First she took a plastic bag from the cupboard under the stairs, then went up to the bathroom and opened the cabinet. Inside were the usual things: aspirin, antihistamine, antacid tablets, cold capsules, cough medicine and some old prescription antibiotics. Leaving only the cough mixture, she emptied the rest into the bag.

  Next she crept into her parents’ room. They kept their various pills in the top drawer of the bedside dresser. She took out her mother’s tranquillizers and Mogadons and her father’s blood-pressure tablets and poured them all into the plastic bag too.

  In her own room, she opened her shoulder bag and found the prescription analgesic the doctor had given her for her pain. It was the same bag she’d been carrying the night of the attack, and she realized that she had never really wondered what had happened to it before. The police must have been through it, then had probably returned it to her room at the hospital while she was still unconscious. Emptying it on her bed, she found half a month’s supply of birth-control pills still left. Smiling at the irony, she added them to her bagful and carried the lot back downstairs.

  The living room was a huge split-level affair. At the front was a bay window that looked out on the lawn, the honeysuckle, the rose beds and the High Street beyond the white fence; at the back, French windows opened out onto the large garden, with its central copper beech, more flower beds and a croquet lawn. Beyond that was the woods. Kirsten opened the windows to let the sun slant in and sat on the carpet in its rays. She had taken a bottle of her father’s best whisky from the cocktail cabinet – Glen-where-am-I, he always called it – and set it down beside her.

  She picked up the plastic bag and poured the collection of pills onto the carpet in front of her. They were all the colours of the rainbow, and more besides: blue, green, red, white, yellow, pink, orange. Then she picked a few up, trying to get a nice selection of colours in her palm, swallowed them, and washed them down with a belt of Scotch straight from the bottle.

  It was idyllic, sitting cross-legged there in the honeyed sunlight as the bees droned from flower to flower outside the French windows. Kirsten hadn’t eaten all day, and she soon began to feel light-headed – light except for the dark cloud, which was far more dense than possible for something so small. At least it was small today. Sometimes it swelled up like a balloon, but today it was a nasty black marble. If she held it in her hand, she thought, it would probably burst right through her flesh with its weight.

  A red one, a blue one, a yellow one, and a gulp of fiery whisky. So it went on; the level in the bottle dropped and the pile of pills on the tan carpet diminished handful by handful. Soon, Kirsten’s head was swimming. Specks of light danced behind her closed eyes. When she opened them and looked out onto the sunlit garden again, she could have sworn it was snowing out there.

  27

  MARTHA

  After Martha got off the bus at the station near Valley Bridge Road in Scarborough at about one o’clock in the afternoon, the first thing she did was grab a ham and cheese sandwich and a half-pint of lager and lime in the nearest pub, a quiet, run-down place with sticky tables.

  She felt much calmer than she had earlier in the day. The news had hit her so hard she had almost given up, but in the end it had only strengthened her resolve. She couldn’t go back without finishing her business on the coast. But now she knew that her precious instinct wasn’t infallible, she would have to be much more certain the next time. How she could find proof beyond what she remembered of his appearance and voice, she didn’t know. Perhaps she would have to lure him on and confront him. When Grimley had said he didn’t remember her, he had been telling the truth. The real killer most likely would remember her, and if she could get him to admit to that, then she would be sure. She didn’t want to leave a string of bodies behind her before she got the right one. She shivered at the thought of turning into the kind of monster she was out to destroy.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and got up to leave. Things weren’t as simple as they had been a couple of days ago. Now there was a chance that the police would soon identify Grimley and start looking into his death. Martha couldn’t let herself get caught. She had already moved out of the Abbey Terrace room, but there were a few other things she could do to preserve her freedom before returning to Whitby.

  She walked past the train station, then turned right down Westborough, where there seemed to be plenty of activity. The street guide she’d bought in Whitby gave her some sense of direction as she explored the side streets, but it didn’t mark the main shopping areas. From what she could see, however, she was close to what she needed. The weather was just as grey as it had been earlier in Whitby, though the drizzle had stopped and it was warm enough now for her to take off her quilted jacket and carry it over her arm.

  What she needed first was a big department store. Marks & Spencer would do fine, she thought, noticing the frontage: the clothes there were well made and reasonably stylish, but not too expensive. After wandering around the ladies’ wear floor and flicking through the racks, she chose a plain, pleated black skirt, which hung well below her knees, and some black patterned tights to go with it. For the top, she bought a cream cotton blouse which buttoned up to the throat. She also picked out a navy-blue cardigan in case it got cool again.

  In the shoe department
, she chose a pair of no-nonsense pumps – sensible shoes, her mother would have called them – durable enough and easy to walk in. As soon as she had made her purchases, she went outside to a public toilet and changed, storing her old gear – jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and quilted jacket – in the holdall. No point throwing the stuff away, she thought. Nobody was likely to want to search her bag, and she could certainly wear the clothes again. She studied herself in the mirror and approved of the result. Nice girl, secretary perhaps, or receptionist. It was just the right inconspicuous, anonymous effect she was after. To improve the new look, she could also start wearing her glasses instead of contact lenses.

  The sun had bored a few ragged holes through the cloud covering, and families were heading down Eastborough towards the South Beach. The children no longer hung onto their parents’ hands, but dawdled and squabbled, swinging bright plastic buckets and spades. The occasional courting couple ambled by, hand in hand, in no hurry to be anywhere as long as they were with each other.

  Martha found a Boots and made a beeline for the make-up counter. There she bought the basics: lipstick, eye-shadow, mascara, foundation, blusher – all in perfectly ordinary, conservative colours. In a cafe toilet across the street, she stood next to another woman who was also doing her face. The woman smiled and made small talk about the weather and the way men always complained about how long a woman spent in the toilet.

  ‘And do you know,’ she went on, squinting as she applied thick mascara, ‘I don’t even think they notice the difference when we come back. What do they think we’re doing in here all that time? Do they think our bladders take longer to empty or something?’ She chuckled, then sighed. ‘Is it worth it? I ask myself.’ She put on a coating of glossy red lipstick and patted her lips with a Kleenex to remove the excess. Then she sucked and pursed them a few times, just to make sure.