“Adela?”
“Yes. She had a clear out. Took a load of things that she said you never use. To a charity shop, ironically. And the records were amongst these things. As were several copies of your book.”
There was a long pause, then he said, “The little bitch. Copies of my book?”
“She said there were hundreds of them, and nobody ever buys any. She said you’d never notice.”
“Well, she’s wrong there,” he said triumphantly. “And I knew some had gone missing.”
I’d had enough of this. I said, “You did it, didn’t you?”
He sighed and looked at me. “Let me tell you something interesting. I know you don’t have any kind of recording device on you. You’re not even carrying a phone. Do you know how I know that?”
I said, “Because you’ve got a bug buster in that drawer. Quite possibly a Stone Circle 10, sold to you by a guy at Spook Store with some very dodgy stubble shaved in the shape of a Maori tattoo.”
For the first time, Osterloh looked utterly wrong-footed and unsure of himself. “How did you know that?”
I shrugged. “There’s only so many places in London where you can buy those things. What is it with that guy and his stubble?”
He smiled. He’d regained his composure. “An ignored child, perhaps,” he said. “The important point is that I can deny anything that is said in this room and you have no way of proving otherwise.”
I crossed my legs and tried to relax. “In that case you have no reason not to talk to me.”
He gave me a long, speculative look. “What do you want to know?”
“You sent Nic Vardy to kill us, didn’t you?”
He smiled. “If I did, I would be very upset with the job he did. Or didn’t do, rather.”
“But it wasn’t just Nic Vardy, was it?” I remembered the old woman and the man with the glasses in the house in Canterbury. And the man who’d helped his friend with the glasses over the Trevertons’ back wall, with an arrow in his shoulder. One of these was my candidate for the idiot who’d thought the Glenn Miller records were a vital clue, and had triumphantly scooped them up. I wish I could have seen the look on Osterloh’s face when he’d been presented with this proud find.
Osterloh spread his hands. “I’ve met many interesting people over the years. Some socially, like Nic Vardy. Some in a professional capacity. For example in the course of my visits to prisons.” He grinned at me. “I get to know them. Their strengths and weaknesses and foibles. And I keep track of them.”
“What about Vardy? What were his foibles?”
“Throughout his long career Nic did many questionable things. Usually involving women, girls who wanted to be famous. He did many things he came to regret. And he told me about them. Discussed them with me at our regular weekly sessions. I would offer him advice. Make suggestions.”
I said, “You blackmailed him.”
He looked annoyed. “All I did was encourage him to do what he wanted to do anyway. In any case, the key to Nic Vardy was not his predatory treatment of young women. It was his response to hunting.” He looked at me to make sure I was following his monologue. “He was conflicted about killing birds.”
“He hated doing it,” I said.
“He hated it because he loved it so much. He hated what it revealed to him about himself. So he tried to repress it, to deny it. But of course that didn’t work.”
“Not with you as his shrink,” I said.
“I merely told him to explore his own possibilities. Essentially, to do what he wanted to do anyway.” He made a clucking sound and shook his head. “But he never had the courage to fully embrace that aspect of himself. Look at what happened when he killed the goose—”
“The goose?” I said. Gwenevere?
Osterloh nodded. “He strangled it with a piece of wire. And greatly enjoyed the experience, I’m sure. But then what does he do afterwards? Does he make use of what he has discovered about himself, and build on it? No. The weakling has such a crisis of conscience that he has to take down all of the photographs of birds on his wall. Because he can’t bear to look at them.”
“Why did you have him kill the goose?” I said.
“Oh, that was only a means to an end. When you went to your friend who sold the rare singles it was obvious that you were going after that record by Valerian. The one with the supposed secret message on it.”
“And you thought that message might be something about you?”
He shrugged. “The goose merely got in the way. Of course, once I had a chance to listen to the record—luckily I still have my Bang and Olufsen turntable—I realised that it was irrelevant. So I made Vardy put it back. I sent him back the next night to plant it among the debris he’d created the first time, when he was looking for it. It was all very straightforward.” He smiled at me.
“Because there was no longer a goose to get past.”
“Yes. So he returned the record for your friend to find, and to cover our tracks. I assume your friend did find it?”
“Yes, he did,” I said, repressing the ridiculous urge to thank him.
“But Nic Vardy just couldn’t face what was within himself. So I had to take him by the hand and lead him, so to speak.”
“Right up to our front door,” I said.
“If you like. As I said, it was his slobbering affection for all manner of birdlife that was the key to the man. I knew he had a deep-seated longing to explore his penchant for animal cruelty and I—” He looked at me. “I might say we gave him the opportunity to do so. But after he had killed that goose he manifested such tedious and protracted regret that I began to wonder if he was actually contemplating suicide. I decided then that I must act quickly if I was to make use of him. I wanted him to deal with you. You and your friend Nevada were becoming a real problem. So I told him what he had to do. He was reluctant, so I simply told him he was hypnotised and had no choice in the matter. He was under a compulsion he couldn’t resist. And whenever he felt himself weakening he was to repeat the phrase I had given him.”
“‘It has to be done’,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“Was he hypnotised?”
“Of course not. I just gave him an excuse to express the terrible sadism and savagery that was boiling away at the base of his psyche. I gave him permission to be who he was. I suspected it would destroy him in the process, and that was all to the good. But I was counting on him to polish the two of you off before he made his suicide attempt.” He nodded thoughtfully, as though confirming something to himself. “Which I have to confess he carried off quite well. Very dramatic, in the police station like that. He’d probably seen films depicting heroic World War II freedom fighters who took poison just before the Gestapo interrogators got them to divulge the vital secret.” He looked at me. “That’s why I gave him the capsule. I’m sure he saw such films when he was at an impressionable age.”
“Perhaps he didn’t see any films about blowing two fellow human beings apart with a shotgun,” I said. “When he was at an impressionable age. Which is why in the end he couldn’t do it.”
“Yes, that may well have been part of the problem. Still, as I say, he carried off the suicide quite well, and tidied things up in that respect.”
“Did he know too much to live?”
Osterloh’s eyes narrowed. “You’re being remarkably snotty for someone in your position.”
“What exactly is my position?”
He seemed to make an effort to recover his temper and once again became smooth and civil and professional. “Was that all you wanted to know?”
“No. What about the other people you used, besides Vardy?”
“I told you about them. They’re just various folk of my acquaintance. I employed assorted forms of persuasion to enlist their help. Some feel they are under an obligation to me. Others are happy to do what comes naturally. Still others expected to be paid.”
“What about those two in Canterbury?”
&nbs
p; “I must admit they weren’t my finest choices. I gave them money for the petrol to burn the house down and they pocketed most of it. Then they discovered they didn’t have enough petrol, quelle surprise, and they had to go back and buy some more.” He shook his head despairingly. “It was just a nightmare.”
“For us, too,” I said. He gave me a look of polite inquiry. “Being locked in a house,” I said, “out of our minds on drugs while someone tries to burn it down around us.”
He leaned forward with real interest. “How did you find the LSD? What was your impression?”
“I can take it or leave it.”
“That’s a shame. It’s a pity you couldn’t appreciate its value. It was the most pure, finest grade Swiss pharmaceutical standard, identical to the kind first synthesised by Albert Hofmann.” He began to get quite animated. I think he’d forgotten the context of our conversation, and the implications of it. Or maybe he was just beyond caring. “I have had considerable experience of LSD and the other hallucinogens, sometimes at extremely high doses.” He chuckled reminiscently. “I almost had a ‘bad trip’ once.” He looked up at me, eyes bright. “You know what I did? I exerted my will. I simply took charge of myself and calmed myself, and restored the experience to its proper therapeutic norms. It is a very beautiful and powerful drug. But it’s not for everyone. Or perhaps I should say, not everyone is for it. Some people are simply inadequate, unworthy of the psychedelic experience. So you might argue that the ordeal of the bad trip acts as a kind of gatekeeper, filtering out those who are unfit and only allowing those who have the requisite psychological robustness to move on.”
“To the sunlit uplands,” I said.
“Despite your sarcasm, yes, that is exactly what they are. And since you asked about Valerian, she was one of those who tried but failed. She was found wanting.”
“You killed her,” I said.
He leaned back in his chair and studied me. “Of course I killed her.”
“Why?”
“In the course of my work I had encountered some extraordinary individuals, such as Charles Sobhraj, the so-called Charles Manson of India. People who don’t acknowledge the existence of the boundaries and conventions that stifle most human beings. They have experiences beyond your imagining.” He tapped his finger on the desk as if indicating a point. “I wanted to see what it felt like. So I talked Valerian into the noose and I talked her out of the window. I just wanted to see if I could do it, and I could. I don’t think I even needed the acid, although I made sure she’d taken plenty. She just went and did what I told her to do.” He looked up. “It was certainly a first for me.”
“You were supposed to be helping her. She trusted you.”
He shrugged. “If someone can’t maintain the sovereignty of self, preserve the most basic of psychic defences, if they don’t even have that most fundamental level of self-love, then they deserve whatever the world throws at them. They are as evanescent, as ephemeral and as vulnerable as soap bubbles.” He smiled at me. “And there’s no shame in bursting them.”
“Nobody knew you’d done it?”
“Don’t be absurd. The place was a circus. No one ever knew what was going on. The only one who might conceivably have put two and two together was her sister. So after Valerian died, when she was grieving, I gave Cecilia what she thought was a sedative. But it was the most powerful LSD I could source.” Once again his voice grew rich with nostalgia. “I remember watching her when it took hold, at the funeral. It was extraordinary. I thought her head might pop like a light bulb blowing. Of course, the drug was interacting with all sorts of underlying mental pathologies and weaknesses. It opened up a seismic fault that had always been there, and triggered a psychic earthquake, so to speak. One that had been waiting to happen.” He nodded, deep in thought. “It’s very impressive that you managed to get her back as much as you have. A testament to the toughness of the human psyche.”
“The sovereignty of the self,” I said.
He flashed me a look of annoyance. “I did the world a favour with Valerian. I improved the gene pool, or rather the mind pool. You have no idea how screwed up that girl was. And if she’d remained alive who knows how many others she would have messed up with her neuroses and her obsessions?”
“Is that really why you killed her?” I said. “As an altruistic act for mankind? I don’t think so.”
He placed his hands on the desk in front of him and studied them as though checking his manicure. “All right then, what do you think?”
“Erik Make Loud said you were one of the few men in her circle she didn’t have sex with.”
“True.”
“But I don’t think that was your choice.”
He looked up and studied me for a long moment. “Why do you say that?”
“I’ve seen pictures of a lot of the lucky guys. They were all big, impressive, charismatic. Jolly jock types. There wasn’t a little shrimp of an academic among them.”
If I’d made him angry, he did a good job of concealing it. “I was right to think you were dangerous,” he said. “It’s true. She dispensed her favours far and wide. She would have slept with the postman if he’d asked her nicely. But she wouldn’t sleep with me. Too bad. Who knows? If she had, she might still be with us.” He stood up, signalling that our interview was at an end.
“So, congratulations,” he said. “You worked it out. But what have you achieved, really? You can’t prove anything. If you try to repeat what I’ve said, I shall merely deny it. And in any case, I don’t anticipate you being a problem for long.” He smiled at me. “When you walk out the door I shall simply make a phone call and arrange for you to be dealt with. And regrettably your lady friend too. It will cost several thousand pounds to have it done properly. But I know it will be a thorough, professional job because I have met some very thorough, professional people as patients in the course of my career. Indeed they have offered just this kind of assistance, should I ever need it. I have never availed myself of these kind offers, until now.”
“So you’re going to kill us?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of polite helplessness. “What other choice do I have? I am who I am, and you are who you are. For example, I know you won’t try and do anything to me, despite what I’ve said. You could no more physically attack me than you could swim the Atlantic Ocean. We are all, ultimately, victims of who we are.”
He concluded on a rising note, with a nice air of finality, which I assumed he’d learned from years of giving lectures. I rather spoiled the effect by turning to the open door and saying, “So what do you think of all that bullshit?”
Nevada stepped in.
Followed by Cecilia.
I turned to Osterloh and said, “You shouldn’t keep a key in the lamp by the back door. Not all your intruders are going to be imaginary.”
Cecilia was staring at Osterloh. “You killed Valerie,” she said. He must have seen something in her face, because he made a break for the door. But she lunged powerfully and pinned him down, like a cat catching a mouse by the tail.
He struggled, but she held him tight in a cruel parody of a lover’s embrace. “Cecilia,” he said, “Cessie—”
She looked at us and said, “Go. Get out of here now. I’ll deal with him.”
Nevada and I turned and started for the door.
He called out. “Please don’t go,” he said. “Don’t leave me with her.”
I said, “It has to be done,” and we walked out the door.
* * *
We went and got the car and drove away into the night. We covered about half a mile in silence and then I slowed down, my foot drifting off the accelerator almost of its own volition. I hit the indicator and we coasted to the side of the road. I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my hands hurt. I stared out the windscreen, straight ahead.
“I can’t do it,” I said.
“I’m so glad you said that,” said Nevada. I turned to look at her. Her face was strained and pale
in the unearthly glow of the streetlight.
“I can’t just leave him there like that.”
“I know,” said Nevada.
“Even him.”
“I know.”
“We can turn him over to the police. Between the three of us we’ll be able to hang something on him.” I threw the car into a U-turn and we headed back the way we came. Because of the one-way system, progress was maddeningly slow.
And, long before we got there, we saw the flames.
By the time we arrived the fire was pouring into the sky from the roof of the pink house as though from a giant chimney. The underside of the clouds had taken on a coppery glow and the autumn chill had given way locally to a furnace warmth. There were people standing in the street, neighbours, some of them in pyjamas and slippers.
There was no sign of Cecilia.
We drove around looking for her, but in the end we had to give up. As we turned towards home three fire engines passed us, going the other way.
32. DRINKS
“So the bastard is dead,” said the Colonel. “He killed Valerie, but now he’s dead.”
Nevada nodded. “He died in the fire.”
“And the authorities are treating it all as purely accidental,” I said. “Just one of those things.”
We were sitting in the same hotel bar where we’d met before. The only difference this time was that Lucy was with us. As usual, she and the Colonel were sitting as far apart as they could without actually being at separate tables. Lucy was wearing a rather natty houndstooth jacket that Nevada had sold her, over a bright pink sweatshirt with blue cartoon lettering that read BABY ON BOARD. The Colonel was, as ever, resplendent in L.L.Bean.
Lucy said, “Do we know what actually happened, in the house? How the fire started?”
“No,” I said. “And I don’t imagine we ever will. Once we saw the place going up in flames, and we couldn’t find Cecilia, we didn’t know what to do. We spent a couple of hours trying to figure out our next move.”
“And in the end,” said Nevada, “we decided the best thing was to drive down to Canterbury, even though by then it was the middle of the night.”
The Run-Out Groove Page 29
