Caldwell opened his door and got out. Kate stayed hunched over the wheel. I wondered what their conversation had been like. What excuses had he produced? Had he denied it? What did she believe now?
He straddled the fence and began walking towards me, a long stride, heels hitting hard on the path like he was pacing out a cricket square. And suddenly I knew that gait. I’d seen it loping away from me. Down a back alley in Avignon.
This time he was wearing a thick coat and hat against the clinging air. His hands were in his pockets. As he got closer I could see that whatever he’d done wasn’t getting to him. A bit red and strained round the eyes, but none of that bulging, berserker look the public expects in the insane. Take it from me, and I’ve seen plenty, some of the craziest guys in the world look perfectly normal until you engage them in conversation and find they can only talk about rats or the colour red.
Caldwell stopped ten feet from me. How was I going to knock that smile off?
“Well, McRae. You’ve saved me a lot of trouble. I’ve been hunting high and low for you.”
“You have it wrong, Caldwell. I’ve been hunting you. Didn’t Kate tell you the cavalry won’t be coming to save your neck?”
“You mean Wilson? An oaf. He got what was coming to him.”
“I thought you were buddies?”
“A common cause.”
“When did you point him my way?”
He laughed. “Remember that first visit he made to your office? You don’t think that was an accident, do you?”
No, I didn’t. Too many coincidences. “Did you know him before?”
He shook his head. “He likes giving interviews. I saw his name.”
“After the first murder?”
He said nothing. I changed key. It was too soon to go down that road. “Your sister has been very helpful. I mean the Graveney one.”
He frowned. “You shouldn’t have told her that. She didn’t need to know.”
“Because it spoiled your games? What were these games, Caldwell? They sound fun.”
The frown vanished from his face. He grinned, like a dog grins just before it takes a piece out of your leg. He considered the question for a while.
“We had a dare. A double dare. Truth, dare, kiss or promise.”
“The kid’s game?” I asked with wonder. We used to play it in Hayward Park. A gang of us, girls and boys, average age ten, looking for excuses to cop a feel or allow a secret passion to be dragged from us in front of our object of desire. We’d spin a bottle and the loser had to call out his or her choice: tell the truth, take a dare, kiss a girl, or make a promise. The loser had the right to pronounce on the action.
I remember Lizzie Kirkland getting a double dare to put her hand up my short trousers. I think she was disappointed. It seemed a big deal at the time. But it wasn’t very brave or inventive alongside what Caldwell was telling me…
“Not kids!” he exploded. “At first, yes. But it was more important than that. Kate liked it. It was our thing. The thing only we knew about. No one else would have understood. The game went on for a long time. Years. Higher risks, more excitement. Our game.” His face had changed. It was as though he was describing a religion. Perhaps he was.
“But you didn’t let Liza play?
He snorted. “She was never in our league. It was just Kate and me. Just the two of us. Since I first saw her.”
“So you went on playing the game, hoping it would lead to what? Fucking your sister Kate?”
His face twisted. “Shut your filthy mouth! You don’t understand. I didn’t know. I didn’t know who I was until it was too late! I wanted her. Thought I could have her. Only Liza knew.” He fought for control. He wiped both sides of his moustache with his left hand. His right stayed in his pocket.
“And you bought Liza off with sex.”
“It wasn’t like that! It made her happy.”
I laughed. “Charitable of you. And it let you go on playing the game. Then you got to the big ones. Life and death. You started murdering people because she dared you?” I wanted to hear this story and I was gambling that he wanted to tell it. Murderers always want to justify themselves.
“She never thought I’d do it. It was the ultimate dare. The one she thought I’d stop at. I came back from France and told her. Told her what I’d done. She should have…”
“Should have let you fuck her, Tony? Liza wasn’t enough for you? Was that the deal?”
“Stop it, stop it, you bastard! Don’t talk of her like that! You don’t know what it was like! She was so lovely, so beautiful. I worshipped her. I almost had her.”
The control was slipping. His face was the face of a man whose dreams had been shot to pieces. All those years, keeping him dangling, teasing, leading him on. Pretending he was married to her. What a bitch. Enough to drive anyone out of his mind. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him. Then I remembered how he’d used Liza, the surrogate. And how he’d slaughtered the others.
“And Kate became a whore in return?” That really got home. He blinked and his jaw hardened. I drove it home. “You dared her to become a prostitute?”
His face was twisting, shifting from distress to anger. He stepped closer. His eyes were bleak.
“It didn’t matter by then. She hated me. She hated herself. For making me kill the French girl. The game was all we had left.”
“What exactly was Kate’s dare? Twenty men? A hundred? Six months? A thousand pounds?” He flinched at every cut.
“I thought she wouldn’t do it. But she did. Like me. I thought it would teach her, but she said… she said…
The man was crying. The poor sod was crying. Tears dribbled down his red face. He looked pathetic. But I was convinced he had a gun in his right pocket. Sad or mad, he could put a bullet in me. So why was I still needling him? Because I felt the disgust in my mouth, like vomit.
“She liked it? And you couldn’t stand that, could you. She did it for others, for strangers, for money. But she wouldn’t do it for you. So you wanted to hurt her.”
“I couldn’t hurt her, don’t you see?” Pain was wrenching his features out of shape. “Don’t you see?!” He pulled his hand out of his pocket. It held the gun I was expecting. It was almost a relief to see it. Almost. It looked like a cannon alongside what I was holding. He levelled it at me and for a second I thought he was going to pull the trigger. I shouted at him to keep up the flow.
“Is that why you killed all these poor creatures, Tony? Five of them, after the French girl.” I gentled my voice, coaxing, encouraging him to let it all come out. “If you couldn’t hurt Kate, you could hurt her kind?”
“It showed her.” His eyes were wide. He was twisting his moustache with his free hand as though he’d rip it off. I’d seen other faces like his, other eyes. Not in the mirror. At the hospital.
I was nearly whispering. “Showed her what, Tony? What did it show her?”
“That she could be next. She should have been afraid. She just laughed.”
“So you sent for Wilson?”
He nodded his head. He was snivelling like a child but the gun was still wavering at my chest. I carefully cocked my own wee pistol in my pocket. I wasn’t going to do anything heroic like try to outdraw him. I’d just shoot him through my coat. It could be mended. I couldn’t.
“It was to teach her. He wasn’t meant to hurt her. I loved her. I love her…”
I should have shut up there. I had to stop needling him before I took a .45. But I plunged on, reckless with revulsion at the pair of them.
“So you killed for love? Those poor lassies? I think you enjoyed it, Tony. I think you got a thrill out of it. You got the taste for it in France and began to kill for kicks.”
His eyes were agony. He was rolling his head from side to side. “She could have stopped it, you know. She should have loved me. That’s all. It’s her fault.” He stopped and drew himself up and took a deep breath. He wiped his face on his sleeve.
“But it doesn’t matter
, McRae. She’s too involved. She can’t leave me. Not now. And we can get away with it. Scot free, McRae, as it were.” He grimaced and placed his left hand round his gun hand to steady it. I clasped my pistol and pointed it at his chest. Then I realised he was staring behind me. I thought it was a trick but he kept on staring.
I half turned. I saw a face in the fog. It looked like Val’s.
“No, Val! Go back! Don’t come near.” I moved a little to one side and turned half to her so I could see them both. Caldwell looked terror-stricken.
“What are you doing here?” he shrieked.
Val stepped closer. She had a wild look on her face. I scarcely recognised her. She seemed to have lost her coat. It was too cold to be here in just a blouse and skirt.
“Stop! Stop or I fire!” Caldwell was pointing the gun at her, away from me.
“Valerie, get down!”
She came on. We formed a triangle, with six feet between us. Mist drifted and coated us, one after the other. Valerie said nothing. Her long dark hair was pulled forward over her shoulder. She did a slow pirouette, so that her back was to us. The neck and top of her blouse were soaked dark. The dark hair above was matted and glistening. In the back of her head, just where the skull joins the neck, was an entry wound. I knew her now.
She turned round to face him. There was blood on her skirt and running down her thin legs. She stepped closer to him.
“Stop or I fire!” Caldwell was demented.
She didn’t stop. He fired once and must have missed. He fired again. And still she came on. I heard a car door slamming and running feet. A cry went up. “No, Tony, no!”
Caldwell dropped to one knee, then the other. He was sobbing. Sobbing and firing. The gunshots echoed round and round in this limbo we’d created.
Valerie stood in front of him, an arm’s length away, a thin smile on her lips. She leaned forward and carefully touched the barrel of the gun. Slowly she tilted it up. The gun barrel rested under his chin. His sobbing stopped. He looked straight into her remorseless eyes. And pulled the trigger one last time.
I walked slowly over to him and knelt by his side. Blood was pooling round his skull. His legs and body twitched, then stilled. His chest fell, but his eyes stared up in endless horror.
“Oh, no. Oh no.” Kate skidded to her knees and touched his hand. It still held the gun.
“Don’t touch it. The police will want to see what happened. Though god knows what we’ll tell them.” I turned to look for Valerie but she’d vanished into the mist. I wasn’t surprised.
“What did you see, Kate?”
She looked up at me, shocked but dry-eyed. She had no tears left. “I thought he was going to kill you. He shot at you and kept missing. Then he shot himself. What did you say to him, to do this?”
I gazed down at his lifeless body, then up at her lifeless face. “I dared him, Kate. I double-dared him.”
TWENTY SIX
I’ve always liked trains and boats. My dad took me by train to Millport on the Ayrshire coast one day. He let me stick my head out the window. I got off with my face speckled with black measles and my nostrils filled with the smell of the steam. As if that hadn’t been the best trip of my young life, I nearly exploded with excitement when we walked on board the SS Waverley, a great white paddle-steamer. I ran up and down every ladder on the boat, as tireless as a yo-yo. We sailed down the Clyde estuary like kings, the wind whipping my face and the sun burning my bare arms and legs. A cloud of greedy gulls hovered over our wake, raucous courtiers to our royal passage.
Today the Channel winds tossed spume against my face as I stood on the prow. And later I sat sedately in my window seat as we chugged through the French countryside towards Paris. I changed at Gare du Nord and found I’d forgotten all my French; either that or everyone was talking faster here in the capital. I resisted the temptation to become a tourist in Paris, even though the April weather tried to woo me; a day like this in Glasgow would be counted as a heatwave.
I had a funny moment at the south-bound Gare d’Austerlitz. It was the noise and the steam and the whistles of the guards sending trains off into the southern sunshine. The queuing people sprang yellow diamonds on their chests and arms, and the porters and guards took on grey coats and rifles. For a daft moment I thought they were going to herd me back into the cattle truck. I stopped and smoked a fag till the panic attack was over. Doc Thompson said there could be more to come.
I’d seen him twice since Caldwell’s death. I was still getting the headaches, but they weren’t lasting as long or coming as often. Resolution he called it. And the memories that I was left with after each episode seemed to be infilling rather than pivotal. Like discovering an old reel of film and playing it and finding holes in it, but not enough to obscure the story.
The Doc had all sorts of explanations for what had happened but I know what I saw. Though I’m not sure what Caldwell saw. After only three months, the fog of that night was beginning to blur the memory of it.
I bought a paper at Austerlitz and waited till we were chugging out of Paris before opening it. I could understand the written word better than the jabbering back at the station. It seemed they were facing the same aftermath as us: lack of food, coal and work. But from what I could see, Paris had hardly lost a chimney pot during the war. And there was no sign of gratitude from De Gaulle for what we’d done for them.
I thought of the papers at home, in the week after that night. I went from villain to hero in five days. Despite what they found on the bomb site – Caldwell’s hand was stiff round his gun by the time they arrived – and despite Kate supporting my version of events, I was hauled off as the Ripper and the attempted murderer of a brave policeman, injured in the line of duty. It was my second time in the cells in a month. This time they treated me with kid gloves.
Wilson, the said brave policeman – damn his black heart, I should have let him bleed to death – survived his encounter with the chair leg, though minus a kidney. But to show his spleen was still in good order, he accused me from his hospital bed of trying to kill him. Fortunately he was too ill to come and beat a confession out of me, and gradually something of the true picture began to emerge as Kate, Liza and I stuck to our story. Of course, we didn’t tell the boys in blue everything. Who needed to know about Kate’s little stint as a Soho tart for example? Or the first murder in France. And I decided not to reveal her knowledge of the London murders. What was the point? To see her pretty neck stretched on the gallows? Though in truth, with what I saw in her eyes, hanging might have been a mercy.
I’d left Kate in her car while I walked off to find a phone box and call the police. They took a while, long enough for us to hammer out our script. Eventually, even the papers managed to get a fairly consistent version of the same tale we’d spun. That war hero Caldwell had come back changed from his harrowing experiences working with the Resistance. That he’d begun killing while the state of his mind was unbalanced. That he’d tried to blame it on me, his old comrade-in-arms, until in a showdown he’d admitted his guilt and had taken his own life in remorse for his terrible deeds.
Though Kate still didn’t understand exactly what had happened to Tony at the end, our views were close enough, she and I agreed. Especially when she confessed over a shared cigarette while we waited for the police, that she’d set Tony up.
“I didn’t want this to happen, you know.”
“But you set me loose, Kate. In my office, that first night.”
“You knew?”
“Your show of concern was unconvincing. And when I told you Tony was dead, you didn’t even pretend to be sorry. You meant me to come after him.”
Her bleak eyes searched some inner distance. She nodded, reluctantly. “I didn’t know how to stop the game. You did.”
“You must have known something like this would happen?”
“But not to end like…” She shivered and waved her hand at her brother’s body lying on the cold ground.
Wilson backed off,
though I heard he was still angry at me, despite saving his worthless life. Seems the lack of a kidney had put an end to his drinking. But as his booze-soaked brain began to dry out, he began to see it was in his own interests to run with my version of events. Especially as it kept his own rancid involvement with Caldwell out of it.
Doc Thompson was asked to add his pennyworth to the profile the police had of me. I doubt if it was very flattering but at least it didn’t condemn me. When I caught up with him, he was even more excited than usual about my case. It was as though he couldn’t wait to write up the paper on me for the Psychologists Monthly or whatever these characters read for fun.
“It was a cathartic experience, Danny. Like the equivalent of a bloodletting for you.”
“That’s not a helpful image Doc, if you don’t mind.”
He seemed pretty pleased with his idea. “No, no, you see your brain has been healing from the physical trauma for a year now. Maybe assisted by the EST. The severed synapses will have been trying to re-lay themselves. Like roads washed away in a flood. All the memories you had were still there. But cut off. Now they’re reconnecting.”
“You’re saying the brain re-grows?”
“We’re not sure, to be honest. But it seems remarkably resilient. Even if there’s no new growth, it seems capable of some re-routing.”
“So. I’m back to normal, am I, Doc?”
I wished he hadn’t hesitated. “As normal as me. Hah, hah, hah.”
There was no real answer to that. I raised the big question. “What about Valerie? How do you account for that?”
“Tell me, Danny, on all the occasions you think you saw Valerie, can you recall anyone else seeing her talking to you?
“Why sure. The first night we were in a pub celebrating New Year’s Eve. There were masses of folk around us…” My voice trailed away. Did the two of us have a conversation with anyone? I thought of our day out in the park; people were looking at us, amused at the sight of lovers, weren’t they? Maybe all they saw was a demented man talking to himself, sucking his own fingers and drinking two cups of tea.
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