‘HIS children? Well, I suppose Julian is his child. I’ve every reason to think so. The others? Joanna, probably. Edward, no. It seemed obvious to me. Perhaps that’s why he and Mr Pardoe never got on. It’s so difficult to tell. Now I don’t have to tell.’
‘Don’t you?’ Sarah’s question was sad.
‘No,’ said Mouse. ‘Not any more than you have to tell the person before who you slept with last. It’s all right for you young things taking the pill. Nature helped me: I could have had lots more babies, but I didn’t. Which is just as well, I’d never have known whose they were.’
‘I’ve drafted a separate bequest for your new will,’ Sarah murmured. ‘Half the residue of your estate, to include a decent house and a piece of his own coast, to go to Stonewall Jones, after your death.’
Mouse nodded, did not even question.
‘I entirely agree,’ she said. ‘I’d already thought of that. I may be selfish, but I’m not dishonest.’
‘Well, all’s well that ends well,’ said Sarah, pouring the dregs into Mouse Pardoe’s glass.
‘Not entirely,’ said Mouse. ‘I didn’t mean to bang on about my family, now we’re all sorted, after a fashion. They aren’t really on my conscience, nothing lingers there long. Except these.’
She fumbled in the pocket of the dressing-gown, worn over a frilly nightie up to the chin, and ear-rings which dangled about the pie-crust collar. Produced a small packet, split at the top. Size 2/0, Sarah read. Super-sharp fine wire: designed and perfected for shore fishing. She turned the packet over, read more . . . Top-quality hooks made from high-carbon steel. She shook one of them into her palm. The point was needle sharp, with a neat, inverted barb. The hook was black; she felt it against her own skin, harmless until the barb took hold. The black hooks, each with a small eye at the top of the stem, curled sweetly in their innocent, polythene envelope.
‘Only one thing bothers me,’ Mouse Pardoe was saying, carelessly, ‘I put lots of these in the sandwiches. And the scones.’
She tipped the glass over her nose.
‘I only did it as a joke. Edward, leaving them all over the place, drove me mad. Hettie could have eaten one. No-one ever eats anything I make: I only do it to annoy. All those years I had to cook; now I can do it for play, like making sandwiches. I would have told them about the hooks before they went near. To make the point to Ed, because then he would never have left anything in the kitchen again, like his father did before. Or hit me. What exactly did you DO to Edward, dear? He’s being so nice.’
Sarah saw Charles Tysall, backing out of the kitchen, stuffing yellow scones in his pocket.
‘Only that man, that Charles,’ Mouse was saying airily, ‘he ate all the sandwiches. I don’t know how he did it, but he did,’ she added with a trace of self-satisfaction. ‘Ate the lot.’
Sarah looked at the hook curled in her palm, remembered the sound of the gulping of food and milk. The hook was such a fine wire, one inch long, small enough, only just, for a starving, hungry man to swallow. She pressed the small, inverted barb, between thumb and forefinger, felt it pierce her skin.
‘Sharp, aren’t they, dear?’ Mouse remarked.
The pain in Sarah’s abdomen became intense.
‘Sleep on it, I would,’ said Mouse, abdicating every decision with a smile. ‘He deserved what he got.’
Rick never could take drink: a little went a long way, so he had been careful, was not drunk now, merely loquacious. How awful, in the village where he lived, to need the company of a stranger on a night like this. No news of Stonewall: he had checked with Jo and the doctor. He might as well stay where he was with this easy man, both of them dirty, other customers in the smart bar giving them space. Two pints simply brought emotion nearer the surface. Rick wanted Jo to hug, but he stayed, giving Malcolm all the information distilled from Uncle Curl and everyone else. Malcolm’s gentler cross-examination techniques worked as well in a bar as they did in a courtroom, especially when the victim was emotional, malleable and confused. Malcolm knew the name, the identity, the local history and the persona of the man they hunted. Like Sarah Fortune, he was all too real.
‘Your Cousin Stonewall thought that this Sarah Fortune woman was Mrs Tysall, did he?’ Malcolm was asking.
‘Only at first. My second cousin in the hairdresser’s did too. What do you think the ghost wanted up at the Pardoes’? Apart from it being a lonely place where he might get food? A place with nothing to guard it but a sheep?’ Rick’s eyes widened, alcohol in flight in the face of realization. The mention of Sarah Fortune made him blush; he thought of her with guilty fondness and a slight tightening of the groin, felt himself pulling his flat stomach flatter.
‘You think he might have gone up there for Sarah? Aw, come on, it doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t even have known she was there.’
‘Listen,’ said Malcolm. ‘In his other life, Charles Tysall had an obsession with Sarah Fortune.’
‘Did he now?’ Rick mumbled, foggy again, but leering. ‘I can see his point.’
They drank reflectively. Not this lad, Malcolm thought. Surely not, not even Sarah.
‘So maybe he’ll go back there, then. S’all right. They got someone watching the place, Jo said when I phoned. And there’s two men up there anyway, well one and a half, if you count Edward. I reckon he’s long gone. He managed months without people, why should he need anyone now?’
Rick drank the last of his pint, did not want to say anything more. Malcolm spoke slowly.
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s a question of Charles going back to find Sarah. Not a question of Charles leading the way to where Sarah is. More the other way round.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean Sarah leading us to Charles. Sarah will find him.’
Rick did not understand.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Meet you outside the arcade. Seven o’clock if it’s sunny. Eight if it rains. Right?’
Malcolm was silent, the taste of his good whisky, sour.
The room in which he sat had become terrifying. He repeated like a mantra phrase, ‘My name is Charles and I have no name.’ When at last he moved, towards the cracked, disused mirror against the wall in the opposite room, level with the high stone sink, all he could see was his face glowing yellow, his brown teeth, eyes which were pink and dry. So long without a mirror, the sight unhinged him. If he had even used a mirror in the last year, he would have seen the damage of the changes; seen how impossible it was to go home. He was beginning to smell. Blood and dirt and cold, hot sweat and putrefaction. Something inside him mortally wounded. Step to one side and watch me, darling. Dying. He had opened his mouth and raised his hand many times, let the hand fall back to wipe the froth which congealed round his perfect mouth, the lips stretched with pain, the forehead puckered with the knowledge of helplessness, his long thin body bent. There were portraits on the wall where he grew up. Red-haired women with the threatening white complexions of his forebears, himself the saturnine changeling.
Finally, he had bellowed with rage and frustration, shrieked like a child in the grip of hysteria and heard his shrieks descend into weeping. Shuffled closer to the opening when he knew the time was well beyond daylight. The lights fell across his face and his dirty white hair; he was ten feet from help, but no-one saw, no-one heard, the place was full of sound.
The rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire, eerie music, echoing gongs, popular songs at colossal volume, the sound of a fairground, the clack of coins and children screaming from afar, sounding triumphant. In the interludes, a droning voice, ‘On the line, fifty-nine, legs eleven, number eleven, sink and dive, fifty-five . . .’ The sounds bleep, bleep, bleep, wailing songs, heavy beat, and the mystical calling of the machines selling their wares to the possessed.
The effort of screaming drove him into a paroxysm of silent laughter, something to excuse the tears. The irony of a cultured man, enduring this orchestra of vulgar, electronic sound, with the purple lights playing upon the yello
w skin he felt he could pull away, while his long hands clutched at his abdomen.
Someone on a misguided expedition to find a lavatory which did not exist kicked the legs sticking beyond the entrance of the ante-room, swore, went back. Later, another, ignoring him even while his mouth opened to scream again, left him for drunk instead of dying. The thought of a drink made his throat contract; he was thirsty, had only come in here for water which he could not reach, never left in twenty hours.
Charles dozed; when he opened his eyes all sound had ceased and he gazed into the peace of total darkness, the opportunity for rescue ending while he slept. Panic now, blood in the pee which soaked the track-suit trousers, the smell of himself disgusted him. He crawled.
Away from the dead machines, which stood like coffins in the back room, across the eerie moonlit floor, illuminated from the windows of the fold-back doors leading on to the road and the pay-and-display sign for the quayside car park. Clutching at the inside handle, feeling it rattle and the whole edifice of the door shake as he raised himself to his knees and looked out into the night in an attitude of supplication, looking for the moon and redemption.
Saw a figure turn, stamp feet, turn back, light a cigarette to illuminate its uniform, stub out the cigarette as someone passed by and said, Good-evening, officer. A woman, treating a police officer with polite deference as her dog bit his heels. Better die like a dog than live like one.
He began to crawl back, slowly, leaning against Omen III and Street Fighters IV. Thirsty, thirsty, thirsty.
‘Room after room,’ he whispered,
‘I hunt the house through . . .
Next time herself! Not the trouble behind her.’
Browning in the mouth. The stanzas a litany for a shuffling old man who could remember nothing else but obscenities. Not a self-created vagrant, a real one. Once back in the room of the dead machines, he shat himself. The shame was so insupportable, the act of it so painful, he wept.
Stonewall Jones woke, with an urgent desire for the lavatory and a sense of shame in that. He was confused, but very clear about his needs. Coke, not milk; the embrace of his mother, not the nurse.
Sarah had never managed the art of travelling light, nor of counting back into her baggage what she had put in. In the dim light of dawn, she still noticed that there was less, one purple shirt, with the trousers and shoes donated to the greedy sea, one black shirt, with leggings, which she hoped Joanna would enjoy. The child had not been near, which she did not find strange in one normally so considerate; Sarah knew she bore her own kind of contagion, a kind of hidden, moral embarrassment which afflicted those of normal tendencies with a kind of unease.
She bent into the pain. Charles had occupied her dreams, the sense of his presence overpowering. The knowledge of the poisonous hooks in his body consumed her. She woke to the sound of gossiping birds, shrill and cheerful. Perhaps it was the signal they had found him.
The sea mist had descended, the air soft, damp, light struggling through.
Was it cowardly to leave after this fashion, skulking away at dawn in this chilling mist, to a home which was not a home, never had been since Charles had invaded the casual, clandestine, delightfully promiscuous progress of her life and called her a whore? Cowardly to leave, before anyone should find him first and ask her to identify their prize? To go with the same fear, the same lack of a conclusion, the same shame, back to the same hopelessly damaged life?
She closed the door of the car with the crumpled wing, leaving her things inside it. Hettie the sheep bleated with satisfaction. There was no hurry after all.
She walked to the village-cum-town, listening to the gurgling of hidden water. Walked beyond the quay and out on to the causeway. The red roof of the lifeboat station was scarcely visible, the siren, having issued its warning against the fog, remained silent. Sarah paused, turned, scanned the quayside. It was small and manageable, harmless. She could see the folding doors to the arcade slightly open and a man cleaning the windows without enthusiasm before he walked away from the task. Then a shaft of struggling sunlight pierced through the thin mist, illuminated the glass of the windows, disappeared as suddenly as it had struck, like a signal. Sarah knew with a complete and illogical certainty where Charles Tysall was. She began to walk back, watching her feet, feeling the quickening pain in her guts and listening to the vengeful messages of her own heart.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She was screened for a minute by the cars which seemed permanent fixtures of the car park, the shellfish van and a slow rumbling lorry full of animal feed, the sound of the growling engine ominous in the silence. When Malcolm reached the quay, to meet his appointment with Rick in the expectation that Rick might be late, Sarah had gone. There was an oldish man, with a figure stiff with resentment, coming round the corner, chewing on something, cap over one eye.
‘Excuse me, have you seen a chap called Rick? Works here?’
It sounded like an accusation: Rick’s father blenched. ‘Nope.’
‘Only I was supposed to meet him here,’ Malcolm said, feeling useless.
The older man laughed, nervously. ‘He don’t like the early morning, our Rick. Told me I’d have to clean the windows, not him. Thought he’d got some woman in to clean ’em. Saw her. A looker.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘After Rick, I expect. They usually do.’ Rick’s dad laughed, taking pride in his announcement. Maybe he’d get some fun out of Rick’s conquests.
‘Where did she go?’ Malcolm repeated patiently.
Rick’s dad was thinking of nothing much; comprehension dawned slowly, remnants of another conversation coming back to cloud his early-morning brain, reminding him of the current primary purpose, which was to find a male ghost, not a woman. He supposed the question was related, didn’t think why, but guessed wildly in order to please and get this bloke off him.
‘Think I just saw someone going up the high street.’
They both turned, uncertainly, uphill.
Sarah could smell him first, an animal in a lair, surrounded by the stench of faeces and fear. He was lying with his back propped against one of the dead machines, levered against it for support. The pathetic outline of him emerged first from the half light in there, then the details. The track-suit bottoms had slid down from scraping along the ground, his thin hands were clasped over his stomach above his genitals which flopped in pathetic splendour. Hung like a donkey. His face wore the rictus of a smile, a dirty face, furrowed with tears.
She tried to make her voice harsh, summon up the hatred.
‘Something you ate?’ she said, standing over him, willing him to look at her with the unblinking eyes which looked towards the light instead. ‘Shame on you, Charles Tysall, you made me offer to rut like a pig, and now, you look like a pig.’
How pathetic an insult, and then, suddenly she was weeping. He had been a handsome man once, lithe as a tiger, long limbed, broad shouldered, a prowler with infinite grace, a predator, but such a beautiful man, proud in his body and his obsessions, fastidious, wicked and still beautiful. Never a man to crawl: it became him as ill as a wounded tiger, a rogue elephant with no notion of human distress. She thought of the hooks which might not have damaged a younger, stronger man, but tore at the weaker fabric of this gaunt and starving fugitive with the terrible glitter still in his piercing blue eyes. The rictus turned into a recognizable smile; he held out his hand, the long, elegant fingers flexing, then trembling, trying to summon into a small gesture some remnants of the old arrogance.
‘Imperfectly pure and good,’ he whispered. ‘Look at me, Elisabeth. Are you satisfied?’
She remembered the hands, slender, manicured, soft, caressing her body, spanning her neck, the buckle of his belt biting into her spine, the softness of his balls a cushion against her buttocks before the glass splintered and with it, all limitations on his calculating savagery. Felt the last, great spate of anger against him, remembering that torture, and then even with her own screams in her o
wn ears, the anger died. She tried to retrieve it, hold the need for revenge, felt it slip away as she watched, disgust mixed with compassion, with the treacherous, wasteful pity for him winning in the end. The body was merely a man, a thing, twisting and grimacing, trying now to pull up its trousers in some pathetic attempt at half-remembered modesty. She stooped, indifferent to the smells of sweet, sour and rancid, helped him. He was warm and clammy, screamed when she touched him and there was no satisfaction, even in that.
Water for the saliva crusted round the mouth: she did not want him to be seen this way, sharing for a brief moment the pride which made him want to cover himself, but when she rose from her haunches to find the sink, he uttered a groan of despair. The tap in the other room yielded water onto a rag; when she knelt again and applied it to his face, he moaned again with pleasure, sucked at the cloth with the greediness of a baby on a nipple.
They stayed thus, wordless, she holding him round the shoulders, feeling the bones, keeping the cloth to his face, murmuring nothings, wondering what next to do, with the tears still coursing down her face, dropping onto his skin.
‘Do you forgive me, Porphyria?’ the voice rattled, bubbling from the chest.
She could not say so, could not utter a clear word. She did not forgive him, either in her own right or on behalf of her friend Elisabeth, but she could not bear to see him suffering either.
The door to the back yard opened with a scraping sound; there were soft footsteps, a pair of training shoes, an increase in the light and then a tall shadow towering above them. Charles had hold of her hand, her arm wrapped across his chest; she tightened her hold, felt the papery skin of his palm, while she listened to a gasp of anger, felt the alien tension of bone and muscle, the intake of breath before effort, the scent of violent rage which would never emanate from Charles now. She held him closer, looked up like a fierce little animal. Malcolm stood above her, fists clenched, legs braced, a fighter ready to pounce. He spoke through gritted teeth.
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