The Stranglers Honeymoon

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Is that clear, you silly little bitch? Take your clothes off!’

  Everything went black before her eyes; she had always thought that this kind of thing only happened in tenth-rate books or in old girls’ magazines – but it was happening to her, here and now. It became black in reality. The candle’s little flickering flame suddenly vanished as if someone had blown it out, and it was several seconds before it was lit again.

  Help, she thought. God. Mum . . .

  He pulled her closer and started kissing her. Forced her jaws apart and thrust his tongue so far into her mouth that she could scarcely breathe.

  Then he let go of her.

  ‘Or perhaps you would prefer it a bit more gently?’

  She was gasping and tried to think a sensible thought. Just one would do.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes please.’

  The thought came. Slowly, like a thief in the night. I must kill him, it said.

  Somehow or other. Kill him.

  ‘Take off your tunic,’ he said.

  She did as she was told.

  ‘And your bra.’

  She leaned forward on the sofa and unhooked the straps with her hands behind her back. But he didn’t bother about her breasts. He stood up instead and placed himself behind her. Moved her hair out of the way and put his hands on her bare shoulders. She felt herself going stiff.

  ‘You are tense,’ he said, stroking his fingers along the sharp edges of her collarbones, moving them inwards towards her neck. ‘My fingertips are like small seismographs. I can almost feel your thoughts . . . My sick rose. My sick, sick rose . . .’

  ‘I need a pee,’ she said. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  ‘Pee?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

  She stood up. He walked behind her into the hall, keeping his fingers on her shoulders, as if it were some silly kind of follow-my-leader game.

  I must kill him, sang a voice inside her. Must find a way . . .

  ‘Like seismographs,’ he said again.

  LONDON

  AUGUST 1998

  7

  At first there were two of them.

  Both in their thirties. Both of them jolly and a bit merry after visits to the cinema followed by a restaurant meal together. They lived in Camden Town: this pub was more or less halfway between home and Oxford Street, and this wasn’t the first time they had dropped in after a night out.

  He had been to see a play at the old Garrick Theatre – one of those incredibly thin and pointless West End hits that ran before packed houses for tourist season after tourist season. Thank the Lord there had been an interval, and he was able to sneak out and call in at three pubs on the way back to his hotel near Regent’s Park. This was his fourth.

  The Green Stallion. It was turned eleven, but this was evidently one of the establishments that no longer observed the old opening hours. He had just collected another Lauder’s and another pint when they came in and asked if the empty chairs at his table were taken. The pub was full and noisy both around the long bar and at the tables. There didn’t seem to be any other empty chairs anywhere, as far as he could see. So why not? He beckoned with his hand, and smiled.

  The women smiled back, and sat down. Each of them lit a cigarette, and introduced herself. Beth and Svetlana. Obviously keen to talk.

  Svetlana was Russian, but born in Luton. By hook or by crook her parents had managed to wriggle out of the Soviet Union during the thaw in the early sixties, and of course it was anybody’s guess why they had given their first-born child, born in the West, the same name as Stalin’s daughter. ‘A fucking mystery!’ said Beth, laughing and displaying her forty-eight perfect teeth.

  ‘Beth is just another London bitch who knows nothing about anything,’ explained Svetlana. ‘Who are you, please?’

  He didn’t tell them who he was. For some mysterious intuitive reason he gave them a different name and a different nationality.

  But he did tell them his profession. He could see that both of them were quite impressed, and he knew immediately that he wanted them.

  Or one of them. It didn’t matter which, certainly not: but for the first time for ages and ages he felt that he really must have sex with a woman.

  It wasn’t clear why this was. Perhaps it was his being in a foreign but even so very familiar city. A sort of reunion – he had been there a dozen times before, but when he worked it out he realized that it must be six years since the last time. Six years . . .

  Perhaps it was the warm summer’s evening, perhaps it was the booze. He was agreeably drunk, and when he drank a toast with the two women, he made sure he looked them both in the eye. He couldn’t detect any trace of reluctance. On the contrary. In vino veritas, he thought, and drank deeply.

  Or perhaps it was just the passage of time. He had needed three years, and now they were over. It didn’t need to be any more remarkable than that. You must learn how to wait, his mother used to say. If you are able to be patient, you will be able to achieve anything you want, my boy. No woman will ever refuse you anything, never ever – remember that.

  Not even your mother.

  He realized that he was sitting there and thinking about those very words while Beth and Svetlana had briefly taken their leave to powder their noses.

  No woman will ever . . .

  It was Beth.

  Presumably they reached an agreement during the aforementioned visit to the toilets, because shortly after they returned to the table Svetlana announced that she really ought to be thinking about making her way home. A few minutes after midnight she took her leave and hoped they would continue to have a pleasant evening. With unambiguous looks and routine cheek kisses.

  They continued talking for another half-hour, then they took a taxi to Beth’s little flat in Camden Town Road. His hotel would have been nearer, but a home is always a home – and she had a bottle of white wine in the fridge and a chicken that only needed heating up.

  Shortly after two, she suddenly didn’t want to go through with it.

  By that time he was completely naked, and she was wearing only her knickers when out of the blue she decided that enough was enough. They were half-lying on her cramped sofa, the wine bottle was almost empty, the remains of the chicken were on the table, and she had been stroking his stiff penis.

  ‘I can do it for you,’ she said.

  But she didn’t want to go to bed with him tonight. Another time, perhaps, if he would be staying on in London?

  But it just wasn’t on right now. Could he understand that?

  He said that he could. Moved her hand away and sat there for a while as they drank what was left of the wine. Then he heaved himself up and stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. Brushed her red hair to one side and began stroking his fingers over her soft, naked skin and the sharp edges of her collarbones.

  Asked if he could give her a bit of a massage.

  She nodded hesitantly, and straightened her back.

  He massaged her gently for a few minutes, until her shoulders relaxed and began to sink. She said she liked it. He said that he did as well. He could feel that she was a sensuous and warm-blooded woman.

  Then he felt his own blood reaching boiling point, and strangled her.

  It was probably all over within about ninety seconds. He removed her red knickers and laid her down on the floor, on her back. Opened her legs wide and placed her in a position with her pussy exposed and naively inviting. Her dead pussy.

  He masturbated, and wiped himself dry with her knickers.

  He was back in his hotel room an hour later. Went to bed and slept until noon the following day.

  His flight left Heathrow on time that same evening, and as he watched the multi-million city shrinking away into insignificance through his cabin window, he was convinced that they would never find Beth Lindley’s murderer.

  Never ever.

  He also thought that he had better be careful when it came to wo
men in future. Maybe he should give them a wide berth, that would be the safest bet, of course – but if he found himself in similar circumstances at some point in the future even so, he would be well advised to think ahead.

  Very well advised. He ordered a whisky from the stewardess, and noted that he was sitting there smiling.

  MAARDAM

  SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2000

  8

  She didn’t go out for three days.

  Three nights and three days. She spent exactly seventy-two-and-a-half hours in her room with ridiculously short breaks in order to go to the lavatory. Or to the kitchen to have a drink of water and something to eat. A sandwich. A cup of yoghurt. Or just a lump of bread, there wasn’t much food in the flat – and it was a mystery how all that time, all those endless hours and those absurdly long-drawn-out minutes passed through her consciousness without driving her mad.

  Or perhaps she was mad. Afterwards – the moment she emerged into the rain-drenched street at a quarter to twelve on Sunday evening – it felt as if those locked-in days had already passed.

  As if they had been and gone without touching her.

  She was in her room, her mother in hers. Three small rooms and a kitchen. Moerckstraat. Rain, more rain, and no food in the fridge. A manic-depressive woman and her mad daughter, who had just murdered their shared lover.

  No wonder they were not exactly memorable days.

  ‘I’m ill,’ her mother had said when they bumped into each other on Friday afternoon. Coughed a little, perhaps to prove it.

  As if Monica hadn’t known. As if she was an easily fooled idiot on top of everything else.

  ‘Me too,’ she had answered.

  And frightened, she could have added if her mother had looked as if she were interested in listening. Or if she had been a different sort of mother.

  And mad. And desperate. And scared to death.

  No, perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to say that. Might not even have been able to say it if she had been a member of the best of families.

  ‘I’m going for a lie-down,’ her mother had said. ‘You should do the same. It’ll pass.’

  So, in bed, on her back. Staring at the ceiling or with her eyes closed, it didn’t make any difference. The images came. The same images, the same film. Over and over again in a never-ending stream, until she had the urge to dig her fingers deep down into her eye sockets and dig out those disgusting projectors by the roots and put an end to everything once and for all, and fall down into darkness and silence and eternal merciful rest and forgetfulness . . . These images.

  Benjamin Kerran.

  Standing there in the bathroom, watching her.

  Just standing there, while she squatted on the lavatory seat, emptying her bladder, then trying to press out a few more drops while frenetically trying to work out a plan in her head. Frustratedly and desperately she rejected all possibilities even before they came to the surface of her flickering consciousness. He dug his hand down inside his trousers, contemplating her with glazed-over eyes and an increasingly warped smile, then suddenly he whipped his penis out of his flies, in a sort of perverted triumph, and ordered her to give him head while she was still sitting on the lavatory. That gave him extra stimulus, he said. No, he didn’t order her: Benjamin Kerran didn’t order her to do it, the circumstances didn’t need that. This was different. Instead he used the same remarkable blend of entreaty and threat as before, that was sufficient. ‘You wouldn’t want your mother to find out about us, would you?’ he said. ‘Just one more time. It’ll be easy . . . Don’t you think we should grant ourselves an enjoyable finish, especially as it started so well?’

  And she did what he wanted. Was almost sick as he thrust his penis a long way into her throat, but she was even closer to being sick when she thought of the possibility of biting off his glans penis. Just bite him as hard as she could – would that save her? she wondered. Is that enough to kill a man, biting off his cock? Would one strong bite be enough?

  She didn’t know, and didn’t do it anyway. It wasn’t necessary, as at that very moment she caught sight of a pair of scissors lying on a shelf diagonally behind his back: no more planning was necessary, none at all. All that was needed was to remain cool and calculating and wait for the right moment. That was all.

  And in the insistent cinema of her memory she watches herself flush the lavatory and stand up. Sees herself both from the outside and the inside – these pictures that are three days old, but nevertheless seem to her to be older than life itself . . . She forces him out of her mouth but grasps his penis in her hand instead and tosses him off, just as he has taught her to do during the short and bewitched time they have known each other, and slowly manoeuvres herself into a position behind his back. She holds his stiff cock in her left hand, stretches round from behind his back, meets his green eyes in the bathroom mirror, and out of his line of vision reaches out with her right hand for the scissors, takes hold of them silently and then stabs them into his stomach with one violent thrust. Without a thought in her head.

  Sees his face reflected in the mirror, sees it dilating and expressing first genuine surprise for a fraction of a second. The pain. Then nothing.

  She feels his virility deflating in her hand, just as quickly as the air gushing out of a balloon.

  Sees – and feels – him collapse without a sound, no more than a slight hiss like the flow of air from the one of those balloons, albeit a bigger one. He falls like a felled ox, like a shot beast, onto the blue-green clinker floor with its small goose pimples and false fossils and genuine heating coils, and sticking out just over his right hip are the shiny handle loops of the scissors, like a magic, mythological symbol. The blades have penetrated him as far as they could go, ten centimetres at least, and even as she stands there staring at the body and at her own face in the mirror, she wonders if he is dead. Already dead? Is it so easy? Doesn’t it take any longer than that? Is that all that’s involved?

  And she sees – in the unremitting cinema of her memory – how she leaves the bathroom, rushes out of the flat. How she slams the door behind her with a loud bang that echoes in the staircase and hangs in the air until she is outside in the courtyard with its bicycle stands and rubbish shed and elm tree and bench, because it is a sound-film running in the cinema of her memory. And there is another sound lingering in the air: she doesn’t know if it is real or merely an illusion – a hallucination or an audible mirage: just as she slammed the door, perhaps half a second beforehand, did she hear him shout her name?

  Monica!

  Is that possible? Did she really hear that?

  And just look how she is running through the rain. Racing here and there along the dark streets that seem to be rocking and swaying and branching off in hitherto unknown directions, so that she loses all sense of where she is and of the way home. She continues in this manner for at least an hour – perhaps she doesn’t really want to reach home . . . She pauses three or four times, leans against walls and tries to throw up: she succeeds on one occasion, but not on the others, and when she staggers into the kitchen in Moerckstraat the clock, the old, everlasting brass mantelpiece clock that she and her father bought at an auction when she was only five, is showing a quarter past eleven and her mother is sitting in the living room gaping at a blue-coloured crime series on the telly, and doesn’t even say hello.

  She doesn’t even say hello, nor does she ask where her daughter has been.

  And her daughter doesn’t tell her that she has just killed their shared lover. She simply stands there for a while in the doorway of the big room, which is certainly one of the smallest big rooms in the whole of the town, staring at the uncombed back of her mother’s head and the fast-moving, jerky pictures on the television screen. Then she goes into her own room and stays there for three days.

  Three nights and three days.

  Seventy-two-and-a-half hours.

  Then she goes out.

  The cafe was called Duisart’s, and was evidently op
en until three.

  It was in one of the alleys between Armastenplejn and Langgraacht: she had never seen it before, but then, this was not her home district. The light was dirty yellow and the premises seemed a bit on the shabby side, but she found a corner where she was hidden away and didn’t have to look at any other of the sparsely distributed customers crouching over small plastic tables with their coffees, drinks and cigarettes. Men, almost exclusively men. Aged between thirty-five and a hundred. On their own or in pairs. An elderly, intoxicated lady with a spotted dog sat in a corner.

  She ordered coffee and a glass of cognac: the waiter, with a ponytail, a nose ring and a flower tattooed on one cheek seemed to be wondering how old she might be, then shrugged and came back after less than a minute with the cup and the glass on a tray.

  She sipped at the coffee and at the strong drink in the glass. She was not used to drinking alcohol, far from it: but a voice inside her told her that she needed it now. Something strong. Something uncompromising.

  She needed to think straight, quite simply. And needed help in order to be able to think straight.

  Needed to switch off that worn-out film show that filled her memory, and get to grips with things. Here and now. She emptied her glass in one gulp, and beckoned the waiter to bring her another one.

  I have killed somebody, she began.

  A man who was my mother’s lover. And my lover.

  Who deserved to die. Didn’t deserve to live.

  Not any more.

  Why? Why did he deserve to die?

  Because he had been exploiting them. Herself and her mother and their extraordinary fragility.

  My guilt is light, she thought. As light as a feather. I shall be able to bear it, and nobody need know about it. Nobody knows what I have done, nobody knows about Benjamin Kerran and me, it is all and has all been exclusively between me and him, and now it is hidden away in my head, nowhere else. It hurts and chafes and drives me mad, but that is the only place where it exists. And it will pass . . . my mother suspects nothing and will not be given any reason to suspect anything; if anybody else finds out about our connection with Benjamin Kerran, there is no reason to link that connection with his death . . . My mother, I mean, my mother will not be connected with his death, there is no reason to do so, he has no doubt kept her just as secret as he has kept me, and when they find him nobody will suspect anything . . . They’ve probably only met about five or six times in all . . . no, there are no clues linking him to my mother or to me. They will look for a murderer, of course, male or female; but it will never occur to anybody to start looking around in a cramped little flat in Moerckstraat with ceilings so low that even a domestic pet would have to crouch down in order to move around, there’s no reason for anybody to search for anything in a place like that. No reason to be afraid, no reason to be scared any more, no reason to . . .