The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors

by Jonathan Santlofer

  The woman leaning against the car in the courtyard caught my attention. Her languid pose: long legs crossed at the ankle, right arm folded across her stomach, hand cupping the left elbow, rollie dangling from the fingers of her left hand, a sliver of smoke twisting in the warm evening air, head at an angle, eyes on the middle distance, thick honey-blonde hair cut short … She made my breath catch in my throat. It was an image I suspected I would never forget. I feared I would keep on writing scenes for women in that precise pose for the rest of my career. I didn’t even dare to hope she was waiting for me.

  But she was. Cerys Black, Screenwriting Development Director for the Scottish Film Foundation. It was a fancy title, implying more than a department of one, but I soon learned that Cerys did everything from picking up late arrivals to pitching which projects should win the SFF’s backing. That night, though, I wasn’t interested in her job description. Only that I’d found myself in the company of a woman who made me dizzy for the first time in years. My grumpiness evaporated in less time than it took to stow my bags in the car boot.

  She took me to a bistro by the river. “Everyone’s eaten and you won’t feel like cooking this late,” she said. We ate pasta and drank red wine and talked. I’ve never been able to piece together the route of the conversation. I only remember that we talked about the women in our past. I now have an inkling of how severely Cerys edited her history, but at the time I had no reason to doubt her tale of a handful of youthful affairs and a single grand passion that had taken her to Hungary before it had finally died a couple of years before. It was the sort of conversation that is really an extended form of deniable flirtation and it kept us occupied until the waitress made it abundantly clear that Inverness had a midnight curfew and we were in danger of breaching it.

  We drove out of the city along the side of the loch, the rounded humps of high mountains silhouetted against thin darkness shot with stars. We turned up a steep road that took us away from the mountains to a high valley surrounded by summits. We barely spoke but something was moving forward between us.

  The cluster of low buildings that was our base for the week was in darkness when we arrived. Cerys led me to a cottage set to one side. “You’re in here,” she said. “Downstairs there’s a computer room and library and upstairs there are two suites of rooms.” We climbed the narrow stairs and Cerys dropped her voice. “Tom Hart’s on the right and you’re on the left.”

  She ushered me in and put my backpack by a table facing a pair of long windows. I swung my holdall onto a chair and turned to thank her, suddenly shy.

  There was nothing shy about her response. She moved closer, one hand on my hip, the other on my shoulder, and kissed me. Not the air kiss of the media world, not the prim kiss of a distant cousin, not the dry brush of lips friends share. This was the kind of kiss that burns boats and bridges in equal measure.

  Time played its tricks and made it last forever and no time at all. When we finally stopped, Cerys looked as astonished as I felt. “I don’t think snogging in an open doorway is the most sensible move,” she said. “You should shut your door now.”

  I nodded, numb with disappointment.

  Then she smiled, a crooked grin that lifted one side of her mouth higher than the other. “Which side of it would you like me to be on?”

  If I could say that sex with Cerys was the most amazing experience of my life, it might make more sense of what happened between us. But that would be a lie. It was enthralling, it was adventurous, it was sometimes dark and edgy. But it never entirely fulfilled me. She always left me not just wanting more but feeling obscurely that somehow it was my fault that I hadn’t found total satisfaction in her arms. So I was always eager for the next time, quick to persuade myself that the electricity between us meant the wattage of our sexual connection would rise even higher. I was addicted, no question about it.

  I knew by the end of that master-class week that I loved her. I loved her body and her mind, her reticence and her boldness. We’d hadn’t spent that much time together—she had other responsibilities, and by the third night, it was clear we both needed some sleep—but I was under her spell. I wanted to see her again, and soon. Her work tied her to Edinburgh, my life was at the other end of the country. But I couldn’t see this as an obstacle. We could make it work. We would make it work.

  Looking back, I can see all the cracks and gaps of lies and deception. But at the time, I had no reason to mistrust her. I believed in the meetings, the conferences, the working dinners, the trips to film festivals. I was just amazed and grateful that we managed to see each other one night most weeks. We spoke on the phone, though not as much as I craved; Cerys was only comfortable with the phone for professional purposes, she told me. And we made plans. I would sell my house by the sea in Devon and buy a flat in Edinburgh. Not with Cerys—that would have made her claustrophobic. After the disastrous end of her relationship with the Hungarian, she didn’t ever want to live with someone else without her own bolt-hole. Given what she’d told me about their last months, I understood that. I’d have felt the same, I thought.

  I was anxious about the move, though. Prices in Edinburgh were astronomical. I couldn’t see how I was going to afford somewhere half decent. I’d tried to talk to Cerys about it, but she’d stopped my worries with kisses and deft movements of her strong, gentle hands.

  And then one night she met me at the airport in the same languid stance. Only the cigarette was missing. As always, my heart seemed to contract in my chest. “I have the answer,” she said after she’d kissed my mouth and buried her face in my hair.

  “The answer to what?”

  “How you can afford a flat.”

  “How?”

  And over dinner, she told me. A legendary Scottish star had died a few months previously. The film foundation had just learned he’d left almost all of his many millions in a trust to benefit Scottish filmmakers. A trust that was to be administered by the SFF. “Instead of giving people piddling little grants of a few grand, we’ll be able to fund proper development,” Cerys said. “We’ll essentially be putting money on the table like the serious players.”

  “That’s fantastic news. But what’s that got to do with me?”

  The crooked smile and a dark sparkle in her eyes was the only answer I got at first. She sipped her wine and clinked her glass against mine. “You’re going to be a star, sweetheart,” she finally said.

  It was breathtakingly simple but for someone as fundamentally law-abiding as me, unbelievably bad. We were going to set up a fictitious production company. Cerys had access to all the necessary letterheads to make it look as if they had backing from serious Hollywood players. I’d be the screenwriter on the project. We’d go to the SFF for the seed money and come away with a two-million-pound pot. The company would pay me a million via my agent, all aboveboard. And Cerys would siphon off the other million. And then the project would go belly-up because the Hollywood backers had pulled out. A shrug of the shoulders. It happens all the time in the movie business.

  “It’ll never work,” I said. “How will we convince the SFF?”

  Again the crooked smile. “Because you’re Scottish by birth. Because I’m the person who makes the recommendations to the grant committee. And because you’re going to write a brilliant treatment that will sound like it could plausibly be a Hollywood blockbuster.”

  It’s a measure of how Cerys had captivated me that what worried me was not that we were about to embark upon a criminal fraud. What bothered me was whether I could write a good enough treatment to bluff our way past the grants committee.

  It took me a month to come up with the idea and another six weeks to get the pitch and treatment in place. And of course Cerys was perfectly placed to help me knock it into shape. I called it The Whole of the Moon after the Waterboys track. The opening paragraph of the pitch had taken days to get right, but in the end I was happy with it. Dominic O’Donnell is an IRA quartermaster who wants to retire from the front line in Belfast;
Brigid Fitzgerald is a financial investigator from Seattle. When they meet, their lives change in ways neither of them could ever have imagined. The Whole of the Moon is a romantic comedy thriller with a dark edge, strong on sense of place and underpinned by New Irish music.

  I’d have been terrified about pitching the grants committee if Cerys hadn’t spent her lunch hour fucking me senseless in the hotel down the street from the SFF office. As it was, I was so dazed I waltzed through it as if a two-million-pound grant was my birthright. Not in an arrogant way, but in that “If Scotland wants to be taken seriously in the international arts community, we need to behave as if we are serious” sort of way.

  And it worked. The grants committee was dizzy with its new powers of patronage and Cerys easily persuaded its members that this was the sort of flagship project they needed in order to give the SFF an international profile. The two million pounds was paid into the bank account of the company she’d set up in Panama, which was where we were allegedly going to be doing some of our location filming. My fee was with my agent in days. It took me all of two weeks to close the deal on a New Town flat with views over the Forth estuary to Fife.

  Life wasn’t quite as perfect as I’d expected. Cerys seemed to be out of town much more than before, and I barely saw more of her than I had when I was living at the other end of the country. And of course we had to keep our relationship under wraps to begin with. Edinburgh’s a big city wrapped round a small village, and we didn’t want the grants committee members to wonder whether they’d been stitched up. Or worse.

  Three months after we’d been given the money, Cerys reported back to her boss that the production company had gone bust. She told me he’d taken it in his stride, and I believed that too.

  And then a couple of weeks later, we walked into the breakfast room of a hotel in Newcastle and came face to face with the chairman of the grants committee and his wife. We tried to pretend we’d only just started seeing each other, but my lies were nowhere near as slick as Cerys’s.

  We were both quiet on the drive back to Edinburgh. I was glum and assumed she was too. A couple of days later, I realized her silence was not because she was worried but because she was planning furiously. She dropped me at my flat that night and went back to her place, where she packed the car with the few things she really cared about—clothes, DVDs, books, her Mac, and half a dozen paintings—and left. When I hadn’t heard from her for three days, I borrowed the emergency key to her flat from her neighbor and let myself in. I knew as soon as I walked through the door that she was gone. The air was empty of her presence.

  Sprawled on the chaise longue, I could smell her and taste her. If I’d been struck blind and deaf, my senses would still have recognized her. Having her back in my arms again drew me back under her command. I hated the terrible longing that possessed me but I didn’t know how to make it stop. Before, only her absence had taken the edge off the craving. I thought I was cured but now I knew I was one of the backsliders. Just like those smokers who have given up for so long they think they can afford the risk of the occasional cigarette. And before they know it, they’re back on a pack and a half a day. One fuck and I was no longer my own woman.

  “Are you not taking a hell of a chance, coming back here?”

  She pushed her sweat-damp hair out of her eyes. She’d let it grow and now it was like a shaggy helmet streaked a dozen different shades by the sun. Not what you’d call a disguise, but a difference. “If they had anything on me, I’d never have got another job in the industry. They can think what they like. It makes no odds without proof.”

  “So why did you run?”

  She closed her eyes and ran her fingertips over my face, as if reminding herself of a tactile memory. “I couldn’t be bothered answering the questions.”

  I felt a faint stirring of what might have been outrage if it had been allowed to take root. “You left me high and dry because you couldn’t be bothered answering questions?”

  She opened her eyes and sighed. “Alice, you know I hate to be pinned down.”

  “But you came back.” I knew I was clutching at shadows, but apparently I couldn’t prevent myself from going into pathetic mode.

  Cerys shifted her weight to pin me down more completely, her thigh between my legs exerting a delicious pleasure. “I came back because of you.”

  I couldn’t keep the joy and amazement from my face and voice. “You came back for me?”

  A dry little laugh. “Not for you. Because of you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Because of what you’ve done. Because you owe me.”

  Now I was puzzled. “I owe you? You walked out on me, and I owe you?”

  “I’m not talking metaphorically, Alice. I’m not talking about emotions. I’m talking about money.”

  It was a familiar Cerys roller coaster moment and it left me sour. “Money? You got your share. More than your share. You didn’t have an agent taking fifteen percent off the top.”

  “I’m not talking about the grant money. I’m talking about the movie. You might have changed the title but I’m not stupid. As soon as I saw the advance publicity in the trade press, I knew what you’d done. You changed the name from The Whole of the Moon to A Man Is In Love and sold it to Hollywood for real.”

  “It’s not a secret, Cerys. And it’s my work to sell.”

  “It’s work that wouldn’t exist without me. You’d never have come up with the idea and developed it without me. According to my sources, you cleared another couple of million from the studio. The way I see it, that means you owe me at least another million.”

  I tried to tell myself she was joking, but I knew her better than that. “That’s not how I see it.”

  “No, but if I can’t persuade you to see it my way, the world is going to know how you got your first million. And how much of the work on that treatment was mine.”

  I managed a strangled laugh. “You can’t drop me in it without dropping yourself in it,” I protested, trying to shift my body away from hers but confounded by the arm of the chaise.

  “I’ll throw myself on their mercy. Tell them how I was so besotted by you that I did what you told me. It’s what they’ll want to hear because it lets them off the hook. Better to employ some woman led astray by her emotions than a crook, don’t you think?”

  Cerys telling lies would be far more convincing than me telling the truth. I knew that. And even as I listened to her duplicity, I knew I was still her prisoner. The thought of finding myself her enemy was intolerable. “I thought you cared about me. I can’t believe you’d blackmail me.”

  “Blackmail is such an ugly word,” she said, finally pushing herself on to her knees and moving away from me.

  I shivered, disgust and desire mingling in an unholy alliance. “But an accurate one.”

  “I like to think of it as sharing. A down payment of fifty grand by the end of the week would be acceptable.” She buttoned her shirt, picked her jeans and underwear off the floor, and slipped back into her public persona. “In cash.”

  “How am I supposed to explain that to my accountant? To my bank?”

  She shrugged. “Your problem, Alice. You’re good at solving problems. That’s what makes your scripts work so well. Call me tomorrow and I’ll let you know where to drop the money off.”

  I sat up. “No. If I’m handing over that kind of money, I want something in exchange. If you want the money, you have to meet me.”

  Cerys cocked her head, appraising me. It felt like a health and safety risk assessment. “Somewhere public,” she said at last.

  “No.” I seldom managed any kind of assertiveness with her, but the understanding that had blossomed in the past few minutes made it necessary. “I want us to fuck one last time. Like the song says, for the good times.”

  I could see contempt in her face, but her voice betrayed none of it. She sounded warm and amused. “Why not? Shall I come to your flat?”

  I’m not strong. Carrying a body
down two flights of stairs and down the back lane to my garage would be beyond me. “I’ll pick you up at your hotel. I’ve got a cabin in Perthshire, we can drive up there and have dinner. You can stay the night. One last night, Cerys, please. I’ve missed you so much.”

  A long, calculating pause. Then Cerys made the first miscalculation I’d seen from her. “Why not?” she repeated. We arranged that we would meet in the car park near her hotel on Friday afternoon. “I might as well check out then,” she said. “You need to have me at the airport by eleven on Saturday morning so I can make the Helsinki flight.”

  Perfect. “No problem,” I lied, surprised at how easy it was. But then I’d had the best possible teacher.

  That left me five days to make my plans. I arranged to withdraw the money from the bank because I wanted to reassure Cerys that she was still in the driving seat. I’d show it to her before we drove off to Perthshire, the magnet that would keep her on board.

  Working out the details of murder was a lot harder. Once I’d made the decision, once I’d realized that I’d never be free of her demands or my desire while she was still alive, it wasn’t hard to accept that murder was the only possible answer. Cerys had already transformed me from law-abiding citizen to successful criminal, after all.

  Body disposal, the usual trip wire for killers in films, was the least of my worries. The Scottish highlands contain vast tracts of emptiness where small predatory animals feed on all sorts of carrion. Forestry tracks lead deep into isolated woodland where nobody sets foot from one year’s end to the next. And of course Cerys had walked away from her life before—in Hungary and in Edinburgh that I knew of, which probably meant she’d also done it in other places, other times. Nobody would be too surprised if she did it again. I didn’t imagine anyone would seriously go looking for her, especially since she would have checked out of her hotel under her own steam.