*
The gunshot exploded in my brain like a thunderclap, but it was the searing silence that followed which was the most shocking and painful. It froze my blood and my limbs. I was held rigid by the horror of what I witnessed. All I could do was just stand there, like some wretched statue staring at Max, her wide lifeless eyes, her open mouth and the terrible crimson rupture at the side of her head. Beads of blood shivered down her face.
Her dead face.
Bernstein also seemed shocked at the sight of his own gruesome handiwork. He gazed at Max, it seemed to me in retrospect, with a mixture of amazement and fascination. Childlike, he ran his finger across her brow, smearing the blood along her forehead. Before grief and disbelief had time to completely overwhelm my senses, the fierce flame of red-hot anger erupted within my breast. It roared in my ears, it electrified my body, it galvanized me into action. With a demented roar of fury, I launched myself at the beast, my hands instinctively reaching for his throat. I threw all my weight at him, snarling, gnashing my teeth. My attack caught him completely by surprise and he toppled back, hitting his head on the hearth. He gave a muffled croak of pain. I shifted my stance and dropping down I straddled his body. Taking his head in my hands and pressing my palms hard against his temple, I jerked it forward before slamming it back down on the hearth with a pleasing crack. I heard myself gurgle with glee at the noise. Bernstein’s eyes rolled about in their sockets, spittle trickled from his mouth and his tongue began to loll. Desperately he lifted his arm and attempted to point the gun in my direction. I banged his head down again. Harder this time. The gun went off, the bullet, wide of the mark, smashing an ornament on the sideboard.
Bernstein’s body sagged, the eyes closed and unconsciousness overwhelmed him. I lifted his head in readiness to smash it down on the tiled hearth for the third time. I was sure that one more blow would smash his skull and kill the bastard. Kill the bastard, destroy the man who had shot my beloved Max. But something stayed my hand. Something held me back. Call it conscience, common sense or some moral rectitude within my soul, I’m still not sure what it was. I only know I realized that I didn’t want to kill this bag of scum.
I wanted him to hang.
To hang by the neck until he was dead.
I let his head fall back gently and got to my feet.
Slowly I turned to my love, lying on the sofa.
And then grief came. It rolled in great waves over me crushing me.
How can this be? How can a vibrant beautiful human being become a bloody lifeless shell in just a matter of seconds? In one moment, a life erased. The awful truth that I had lost her, lost her forever, came like a knife stabbing me in the heart. I’d never hear her voice again, or her laugh; I’d never feel her kiss on my cheek, her hand in mine; I’d never feel her arms around me and her fingers stroke the back of my neck. I’d never…
My legs weakened and I slumped into the chair opposite wanting to cry, wanting to sob my heart out—but failing to do so. I was too empty even for tears. I stared at the dead body of my love and the inert form of her murderer on the rug by the fire, unable to think or move. All I could do was stare.
I don’t know how long I sat there. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. I was in some kind of numb cocoon, protected for a time from reality and the pain that went with it. All I could hear was the steady tick of the clock on the mantelpiece and then I became conscious of another sound: a movement in the other room. And then voices. Like an automaton I rose from my chair and walked slowly and stiffly into the office.
Standing just inside the outer door was Peter and a young girl, with long tumbling hair and a pretty face.
They looked a little sheepish as I entered.
‘Hello, Johnny,’ said Peter chirpily, overcoming his embarrassment. ‘This is Caroline. She’s my girlfriend.’
Epilogue
The church was decorated for Christmas. In the nave there was a nativity scene created by children from a local school with small dolls representing Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. Papier mâché shepherds and farmyard animals, garishly coloured, were in attendance at the cardboard stable, along with the Three Wise Men. A spindly fir tree stood at the side of the altar adorned with tinsel, paper chains and a series of tired coloured baubles while on the ledges of the windows there were sprigs of holly and ivy. It was strange dressing for a funeral, but it was somehow comforting and I knew that Max would have smiled at the children’s work and been touched by it.
It was a small turn out. She had no family living and so the mourners consisted of people we knew together. There was Benny, the sisters Martha and Edith, Peter and David Llewellyn. The production company in Nottingham had sent a very nice wreath and the producer had written me a touching and sympathetic letter about my lovely Max. I cried for the first time while reading that letter. There is something very moving about the kindness of a stranger.
We sang a few hymns. The vicar made a suitable address, one I suspect he had used many times before. And I said a few words. Just a few words. What good are words? They don’t have the power to bring people back. Do they?
*
A couple of days before Max’s funeral, I had accompanied Inspector Eustace and his sergeant, a fellow called Jones, to an address in Bermondsey. To the home of June Forsyth. I had obtained the name and address from the photographic studio in Oxford Street. It was June Forsyth’s photograph that I had taken from Brian Garner’s house the day he had been murdered. The photograph revealed that she had a remarkable resemblance to his wife Beryl. It seemed clear to me that she was Garner’s new girlfriend and had been receiving the same treatment as his wife. He was a bully and once a bully…I suspected that she may well have been the savage killer of Garner. You can push a woman so far. I did not verbalize this theory to Eustace. I just said I thought that this woman could help with the police enquiries into Garner’s death. I avoided explaining how I had come into possession of the photograph in the first place and he was a wily enough old professional not to question me on this point.
The house was in a row of tidy terrace houses in a warren of streets each possessing a similar row of tidy terrace houses. We knocked loudly on the front door but received no reply. Eustace was about to begin another round of staccato thumping when the door of the house next door opened and an elderly lady in curling pins shot her head out into the street. She had nosy parker written all over her peaky mush.
‘I think she must be away,’ she said. ‘It’s June Forsyth you want, isn’t it?’
We told her it was.
She nodded sagely. ‘Well, I haven’t seen her in well over a week, so I reckon she must be away.’
‘Thank you, madam,’ replied Eustace.
The woman waited a while to see what we would do next.
Eustace raised his hat. ‘Good day,’ he snapped, indicating this was then end of the exchange. He stared at her until reluctantly she retreated inside, slamming her door shut.
‘I bet she knows what size shoes this Forsyth woman takes,’ he said wryly.
‘I think we go in, don’t you?’ I said.
Eustace nodded.
Some shoulder work by Eustace and Sergeant Jones soon got the door open. I saw the net curtains twitch at the window of the neighbour’s house as our informant peeked around the edge. I gave her a wave and she vanished at speed.
There was some mail piled up behind the door and a strange unpleasant smell in the place.
We found June Forsyth in the living room in an armchair. She had been dead for quite some time. The flies had already gathered to carry out their gruesome business. The smell of death was strong in the air. There was a half empty gin bottle on a table by her side along with several empty bottles of pills.
‘She’s topped herself,’ observed Jones.
‘Very astute of you, Sergeant,’ said Eustace, with a roll of the eyes.
I picked a sheet of paper from the floor by her chair.
‘What you got there
?’ asked the Inspector.
‘What you’d expect. It’s the note.’ I scanned it quickly. It was tragic and trite. She couldn’t stand the beatings ‘no more’. ‘He treats me like an animal’. He didn’t love her anyway. He was still obsessed with his wife. She couldn’t get away from the bastard so she killed him and she was glad. Now she could escape.
I passed the note to Eustace. He grimaced as he read it.
I looked at the poor woman. The ravages of death were already taking their toll on her. The body stank. The face was puffy and blue and the features were ghoulish.
Here was an encounter with yet another corpse.
‘Well,’ said Eustace, clapping his handkerchief to his mouth, ‘that tidies this little matter up. Let’s get out of here before I deposit my breakfast on the carpet. I’ll get the path boys to clear this mess away.’
We walked out back into the fresh air, although somehow to me it wasn’t that fresh any more.
*
Victor Robert Bernstein was executed at nine o’clock in the morning of the first of February 1944. I did not attend the hanging. I was at home in the room where he had killed Max, sitting with a cup of coffee and cigarette hunched over the fire while I watched the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece creep their way inexorably to nine o’clock. As they reached the appointed hour, my body shuddered as though a ghost had passed through me. I imagined the sound of the mechanism, the snap of the trap door and the creak of the rope as it stretched and twisted with the weight of his body.
It was over.
Did I feel better?
No.
It wasn’t over. How could it be over? How could it be better? Max was still lost to me. In the end Vic Bernstein’s execution meant nothing. I was still adrift. Still mourning a lost dream. My life would be forever blighted by the darkness of her death.
If you enjoyed reading The Darkness of Death, you might be interested in Forests of the Night, also by David Stuart Davies.
Extract from Forests of the Night by David Stuart Davies
PROLOGUE
My career in the Army was very short but far from sweet. As a young policeman with ‘considerable prospects’, or so my sergeant told me, I was reluctant to leave the force and join up, but I was idealistic and patriotic and, if I’m honest, in search of adventure. ‘Thank God, you’re going,’ Sergeant Brannigan said with a friendly pat on the back, the day I told him that I had enlisted. ‘I’m too old myself and with you out of the way I can be sure I can hang on to my stripes. You give the Hun what for, eh?’
I didn’t give the Hun what for. Not in the way Brannigan intended at least. I got no further than Aldershot. Something cropped up that changed the course of my whole life. It was December 1939, two days before Christmas, when it happened. I was on the rifle range learning the intricacies of how to fire a rifle with a modicum of accuracy. The officer in charge, Sergeant-Major Stock, was not one given to careful instruction. When patience and coherence were being handed out, he was lagging behind being fitted with an enlarged voice box. No doubt as he emerged from the womb he had given the mid-wife an ear bashing about her sloppy performance. Such was the nature of the red-faced incompetent in charge of firearms training. As a result, the young novices under his command may as well have been looking down the wrong end of the barrel for all the clear instruction that was given. But to be fair to the large-gutted bully, he really had nothing to do with what happened to me. It could have been any one of our company. It just turned out that I was the unlucky one.
We queued up and Sergeant-Major Stock, like a rifle monitor, doled out the weapons from a large wooden box. They all looked the same but unfortunately, there was some obstruction lodged in the barrel of the one I was given. I didn’t know this until I fired the gun and it exploded in my face.
It was as simple as that.
There was a dull explosion and for a moment the world turned a brilliant white like a fierce polar landscape. A sudden, stabbing, violent pain shot up my arms and across my chest and I felt a blast of searing heat on my face as a vivid flash filled my vision. I thought my head would explode. Then I lost consciousness.
When I woke the world was in darkness. A velvet black inkiness pressed down upon my eyes. My throat was dry and my head throbbed like a road drill. I could tell that I was lying in a bed but that was all. It took me quite a time to recollect anything. Gradually I managed to piece fragments of my recent memory together. I heard the explosion and saw the sheet of yellow flame and remembered the pain.
I called out for help. And within seconds I felt the cool touch of a woman’s fingers on my arm and a sweet voice saying, ‘Welcome back to the land of the living.’
I half smiled, but it soon disappeared from my lips. Strangely, it took me a few moments to realize that I couldn’t see her, this woman who had come to my aid. And yet my eyes were open. What had happened? I felt my body grow tense with panic. Once again I recalled the explosion and the bright searing heat. My God, I thought, I am blind.
‘I can’t see!’ I cried, struggling to sit up.
Those cool hands held me back.
‘It’s the bandages,’ she said. ‘You have bandages on your eyes. You have been badly burned, Johnny.’
Johnny. She knew my name.
‘Who are you? Where am I? What’s wrong with me?’
She chuckled gently. ‘Questions, questions. You are in Aldershot General and I’m Nurse Watkins, Jenny to you.’
‘And what’s wrong with me?’
There was a pause before she replied. ‘There was a nasty firearms incident. On the shooting range. Remember?’
I paused a moment to reassemble the memories. ‘I remember—but what’s the matter with me?’ I had gained more power in my voice and my question was brusque and urgent.
I felt her palm smoothing my brow. ‘You rest now,’ she said, avoiding the issue. ‘The doctor will explain everything in the morning.’
‘Can’t you take the bandages off? I want to see.’
‘Not yet, Johnny. We must wait for the doctor. You really should get some rest.’
She squeezed my hand and then I heard her leaving the room.
How could I rest with so much uncertainty hanging over my head? I wanted to know the extent of my injuries. Why was the lovely Nurse Watkins—and to me her voice pronounced that she was lovely—so circumspect about my condition? Despite my worries, fatigue rolled in like a large breaker and swamped me. Soon I was carried away on the sea of sleep. As I drifted into unconsciousness, I was aware of voices singing. A Christmas carol. A radio maybe, or a choir of angels …
*
The next day I was roused briskly and breakfasted on a weak porridge mixture—it was spooned into my mouth—by another nurse, who was businesslike and impersonal, before I was visited by the doctor—Doctor Moorhouse. He was far from circumspect.
‘You’re a lucky man, Hawke,’ he announced, as though he were addressing a class of medical students. ‘You could have had your head blown off—a rifle exploding in your face like that. Count yourself lucky that you’re still here to tell the tale.’
‘What tale can I tell?’ I asked, not wishing to discuss with him his rather twisted definition of ‘fortunate’. ‘What’s the matter with me? Tell me straight, Doctor, am I blind?’
He gave me a gentle laugh. It was unnatural, forced. An embarrassed laugh. He’d told me why I should be thankful to be alive before he dropped the bombshell. That was his bedside manner.
‘Well?’ I prompted, pulling myself up in bed as best I could, angry now at all his prevarications.
I felt the doctor sit down on the edge of the bed. He sighed. ‘You’re not blind, Mr Hawke. You will see again. But I’m afraid that you have lost your left eye. The heat of the explosion …’
I can’t remember any more of what he said. My mind just blanked it off. The shock and pain of his revelation shook me physically. My body shuddered and I started to sweat. Instinctively my hand went to the accursed bandages.
I wanted to rip them off and prove this damned quack wrong.
I didn’t, of course, because deep down I knew that he must be speaking the truth. Why would he lie? I had lost an eye! I was a cripple. A disfigured cripple. I was only twenty-five. Young. Not yet had a serious girlfriend. And now I never would. I was a leper. A disabled freak. Johnny One Eye. At that moment, I wanted to die.
CHAPTER ONE
He pulled the thin, single sheet over his head and curled his body up into a tight, foetal position. It was as though he wanted to squeeze himself into nothingness. He shivered not because he was cold but because he was frightened. Frightened of so many things. He prayed that he wouldn’t wet the bed again.
The light was on in the other room; yellowness seeped in through the crack along the bottom of the door. And there were voices: his mother and a man. Another man. It was never the same man. It was the usual nightly performance. He had no watch but he knew from experience that it must be somewhere around half-past eleven. The pubs had closed and they’d come back. Despite his youth, he knew what they had come back for. He’d glimpsed it one night when his mother had been moaning so much that he’d thought she was in pain. He’d walked in and found them on the rug by the fire. There was this large black man lying on top of his mother. They were both naked. He was panting and sweating and she was moaning as if she had tummy ache.
That night he learned that it was true, the stories he’d heard in the playground about men and women.
Sometimes the men were violent. More than once his mother had a black eye in the morning and on one occasion she had a cut lip. She always shrugged off her injuries as ‘the risk of the job’ and assured him as she ruffled his hair, if she was in a good mood, that the odd bruise often brought in some extra cash.
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