The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  Twenty-five years later, John Underwood stood on the driveway of Paul Heyer’s mock-Tudor detached house and poured a can of paraffin over a suitcase full of his wife’s clothes. He knew she was inside the house, probably caressing a fucking wine glass. Bitch. She could stare into this. He lit the corner of one of her blouses with his cigarette lighter and stepped back. The paraffin ignited with a gratifying whoompf. For a few seconds he watched the fire start to take: the flames quickly licked three or four feet into the air. Things had come full circle. John Underwood walked away and was quickly swallowed by the darkness.

  About a minute later Paul Heyer threw open his front door and sprinted into the night. He had a washing-up bowl full of water and flung it over the blazing suitcase. The air was acrid with smoke and he coughed as it stung his eyes and throat. Julia Underwood followed him and threw a saucepan of water at the fire. The combination worked and the pile of clothes steamed poisonously. She recognized the address tag on the suitcase.

  ‘Bloody lunatic,’ said Paul.

  ‘Oh God.’ Julia put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Paul shouted into the night. ‘You’re a bloody lunatic.’

  The night just listened.

  29

  12 December

  The whole process had taken nearly two hours. Crowan Frayne had driven for about two miles before he had found a suitable place. He hadn’t seen a single car in that time. Nothing had broken the nervous monotony until the headlights had picked out a steel gateway. Frayne had climbed out of the car and looked into the field beyond. It was large and sloped downhill for about half a mile. Away, at the bottom edge of the field, Frayne thought he could make out the dark outline of a wood.

  It looked like a grazing meadow for sheep or cows. Thick grass. It would have to do. He untied the gate, climbed back into the car and he drove through. He closed the gate behind him – no point taking unnecessary risks – and after a quick look along the road in both directions he climbed back into the car and turned off the headlights. Gently, he came up off the clutch and the Fiesta lurched awkwardly forward, gathering momentum as it began to jar and bump down the slope. Frayne could hardly see a thing but found the experience exhilarating: flying invisibly through the rushing blackness. Coins rattled in the glove compartment as the car bounced along the lumpy ground. Frayne could see the line of trees approaching and began to brake slowly: Katie Hunt’s body slid forward and thudded onto the floor of the car. Frayne briefly flicked the headlights back on and off to check his position and slowed to a stop.

  He got out of the car and walked into the trees. It was hardly a proper wood, more a cluster of elms that separated two fields. However, there was a gully about ten feet deep that cut sharply down to a narrow stream. Frayne returned to the car and released the handbrake. He pushed hard against the frame of the driver’s door and, after a second or two of straining against the car’s inertia in the mud, the Fiesta began to move.

  As it moved onto the harder ground at the edge of the trees the car began to pick up speed. Crowan Frayne pushed it over the brow of the gully and then stepped back, panting as the Fiesta crashed nose first into the stream. The car was out of sight: invisible from the road and, Frayne guessed, undetectable unless you walked right up to the edge of the gully. Satisfied, he jog-walked back up the gradient to the steel gateway. This time he climbed over the gate and began to make his way back towards his van, staying on the tarmac but close to the edge of the road.

  In the thirty minutes it took him to get back to his vehicle, Frayne saw only one car and was well concealed by the time it passed him. He was sweating heavily as he sat down in the driver’s seat of the van but he felt a strange sense of satisfaction, as if the hoarse minstrelsy of the spheres had become amplified, blending in with the thumping blood in his head. He had taken a terrible risk and had derived no real pleasure from the act, but he had preserved the integrity of his conceit.

  Had not Donne sacrificed rhythmic and stylistic beauty to sustain the logical structures of his poetry? Few would say Donne’s work was aesthetically pure. Quite the opposite: his style was rough, his language almost violently colloquial. Frayne looked in the rear-view mirror. There was a spray of blood and flecks of mud on his forehead. Donne’s reputation was based upon his wit and logical argument: the yoking of extraordinary opposites, the brilliant unravelling of metaphysical conundrums. History had forgiven Donne his stylistic abrasiveness: Frayne was confident that the beauty of his own conceit had not been violated. Stussman would understand. Like the divine children in the oven, it would remain unblemished.

  He switched on a torch and looked himself over. There was more blood all over the front of his jacket and gloves. His boots were caked in gluey mud. Fortunately, he carried a spare set of over-clothes in a carrier bag in the back of his van. The ugliness from which his poetry emerged necessitated such precautions. He took off his gloves and placed them in a spare plastic bag. Then he stepped outside the van and removed his outer garments: the night air bit and nibbled at his skin, his hands fumbling at the bloody buttons.

  He kept a bottle of mineral water in the car. Now he poured its contents over his hands and face, wiping clear most of the blood and dirt. He wondered if the water would facilitate an osmotic reaction on the surface of his skin: if the subatomic markers of the girl and the boy had been drawn within him. Were they now jostling for position in his brain with the other assimilated dead? They were thick in his thoughts so perhaps they did now live within him.

  There was a grey boiler suit in the carrier bag, along with a clean white T-shirt and underwear. Frayne was chilled to the marrow and it took some time before his body began to reabsorb the warmth it had at first given up to the rough material. He collected his thoughts. He would need a carpet knife, a torch, a hammer, and a pen and paper. His leather gloves were dirty but still functional. In any case, he would use rubber gloves for the operation. He pulled the equipment together into his toolbox and left the car. It was late now and Frayne knew that there was little likelihood of encountering any other traffic on the lonely country road.

  He stepped out onto the black tarmac and marched to a steady rhythm, down the gentle gradient towards Elizabeth Drury’s house: ‘You violets, that first appear’ – light beat, hard beat, iambic foot – ‘By your pure purple mantels knowne / Like the proud virgins of the yeare / As if the spring were all your own / What are you when the rose is blowne?’ He realized that he had spoken the words aloud to the attentive darkness. The scrap of verse had been from Wooton’s throwaway poem on the Queen of Bohemia. Still, it had a nice nursery-rhyme swing to it. ‘Sir Henry Wooton, you appeare / By your childish structures knowne / Inside my head but once a year / As if the darkness were your own / But I’ve a knife and you’re alone.’ Much better.

  Frayne quickly climbed the gate of Elizabeth Dairy’s garden and stole along the fence line to her car. The lights were off in the house now and he was less worried about triggering the security lights. They drenched the front garden with radiance as he dashed from the darkness and took up his previous position behind Elizabeth Dairy’s car. He used the light to note down the address and phone number on her window sticker. He just made it in time before the lights clicked off again. He slipped his small notebook and pen back into the breast pocket of his boiler suit and withdrew the carpet knife from his toolbox.

  Elizabeth Drury slept fitfully. The security lights hadn’t really woken her but they dragged her into an unrefreshing shallow sleep. She dreamed that she was having liposuction. That the machine couldn’t be stopped. A man with no face loomed above her. It was painful: the thing sucked at her legs, then at her arms and chest, pulling fat from her muscles, muscles from their bones, bones from their sockets, organs from their mountings. The pain was a terrible, sweet release. The machine went quiet and she could see herself pulled inside out, floating in liquid fat in a cylindrical glass tank. Then she was looking out of the tank at the man with no face. She couldn’t bre
athe. The machine was beeping a warning, beeping a warning. The flow had been reversed, she was being sucked out of the jar, sprayed across the wall in bloody chaos. She sat bolt upright in bed. Her alarm clock shrilled at her. 5.45 a.m. It was still dark outside. In a clump of bushes across the road from the house, beyond the front lawn and the sleeping car, Crowan Frayne watched the front bedroom light click on.

  Drury showered and wolfed down a bowl of muesli. Her cats mewed hungrily at her, demanding food and attention. ‘You’re such a porker, Misty,’ she muttered through a fog of near-wakefulness at her particularly insistent tabby. ‘You’re going to need laxatives at this rate.’ Drury smiled as the cat whimpered pathetically and rubbed itself against her bare ankles. What was the point? Cats know which buttons to press.

  At 6.30 she closed her front door, double-locked it and crunched across the gravel to her Audi. As the security lights came on she saw that the car seemed slightly lopsided. She walked around the front of the bonnet and squinted at the wheels on the passenger side of the vehicle. Both tyres were flat. She swore loudly and hovered for a second, uncertain what to do. She was about to swear loudly again when she remembered the hundred pounds she paid every year to National Car Recovery Services. She took her mobile phone from her handbag and dialled in the emergency rescue number on the NCRS sticker in the car’s side window.

  ‘NCRS,’ a male voice said eventually.

  ‘Hi there. I have two flat tyres on my car. Could you send someone out please?’

  ‘Name and address, please?’

  ‘Elizabeth Drury. The Beeches, Blindman’s Lane, Afton, Cambridgeshire.’

  ‘You say you’ve got a flat?’

  ‘Two flats. Could you please hurry? I have a meeting in London.’

  ‘We’ll send out a local recovery team straight away.’

  ‘How long will that take?’ She began making her way back to the house, fumbling for her keys.

  ‘Within half an hour.’

  ‘OK. Thank you.’ Elizabeth Drury unlocked her front door and stepped back inside the house. Irritated, she turned off the house’s beeping alarm system and slammed the front door behind her.

  In the near distance, Crowan Frayne emerged from the shadows and hurried back to his van.

  30

  Four miles away, in a pebble-dashed terraced house in Evesbury, Suzie Hunt rolled out of her underpopulated double bed and put on her slippers. She yawned out the dry fumes of a hangover and lit the remainder of the cigarette she had half-smoked the previous night. The smoke warmed her and sharpened her senses, turning on the lights in her head. It had been a late night. She worked part-time in the Coach and Horses on Evesbury High Street and she had stayed after hours. Half a bottle of vodka, a lot of fags and a flabby shag on the Snug Bar sofa with Fat Pete the landlord had left her feeling empty. Mrs Pete had been asleep – drunk – upstairs the whole time. And that mused Suzie bitterly, had been the only vaguely exciting thing about the whole experience.

  Thursday mornings were the worst for her. She always stayed late at the pub on Wednesday nights and on Thursdays she worked earlies at the supermarket in New Bolden. It was a long shift, longer with a hangover. On Thursdays Suzie felt every one of her thirty-six years – and some. She wondered what time Katie had got in. ‘Dirty little slag. Out all hours like an alley cat: just like her mother.’ Suzie almost managed a smile as she pulled on her dressing gown and left the bedroom. The landing was cold and only partially carpeted. She banged on Katie’s bedroom door as she walked past.

  ‘Wake up, you dirty stop-out.’

  There was no response. Suzie shuffled downstairs and filled a kettle. The noise rattled her. She moved to the fridge and took a long glug from a half-pint of milk. The fluid chilled her as it crawled down her throat and she shivered hard. Her head had started to ache quite badly now, though the gurgling of the kettle promised imminent relief. Still no sound from upstairs. ‘Little madam.’ Suzie leaned out of the kitchen and aimed her voice up the stairs.

  ‘Wake up, you lazy cow!’

  The kettle boiled and switched itself off. Suzie poured two cups of tea, both with two sugars, and trudged exhausted back up the stairs. She put down one cup in the bathroom and started running herself a bath. The other she took into Katie’s room. The bed hadn’t been slept in. Suzie Hunt felt a hot surge of anger.

  She picked up the phone in her bedroom and called Katie’s mobile: it rang for an age before switching to answerphone:

  ‘This is the Vodafone recall service. The person you have dialled is unavailable. Please leave a message at the tone.’ Beep.

  ‘Where the bloody hell are you? You ain’t arf gonna catch it when you get back, my girl. Call me as soon as you get this message or I’ll bloody well brain you.’

  She hung up, feeling useless and sad. She hated getting ready for work by herself.

  31

  Elizabeth Drury tapped her finger on the windowsill, mild irritation seeping in at the edges. Twenty minutes had become twenty-five. She had already eaten two doughnuts. She dialled her office number and got Sally’s voicemail:

  ‘Sally. It’s Elizabeth. I have had a total nightmare. Flat tyres on the Audi. It’s 7.40 now. There’s no way I’m going to be in before ten. Can you call Danielle at my publishers and cancel my meeting. I’m on the mobile if anything urgent crops up.’

  She couldn’t understand how her tyres had gone flat. Perhaps she’d driven over something at the railway station: there always seemed to be a carpet of shattered glass in the car park. Both tyres, though? Vandals, maybe: kids too old to stay at home and too young to be in a pub. Had she driven home with two punctures? She shuddered.

  A van had pulled up at the gate, its headlights throwing shadows across the lawn. A man, about thirty-five, got out and released the catch, pushing the steel gate back into the clip, fixed in the ground that held it open. Elizabeth Drury jumped up and put her coffee cup on the ledge of the hatch that connected her expensive new living room with her expensive new kitchen. She heard the van pull up at the front of the house and a door slammed. Footsteps scrunched on the gravel. Through the small frosted-glass pane in the front door she saw the recovery man checking the side of her Audi. She opened the door. The man stood up.

  ‘Mrs Drury?’

  ‘Miss.’

  ‘Sorry about that. I’m from NCRS. I see you’ve had a bit of a disaster.’

  She stepped out onto the drive, the cold air niggling at her. ‘Bad car day. I can’t understand it. They seemed fine when I drove home.’

  ‘And they were flat when you came out this morning? Weird.’ The mechanic lay down at the side of the car and checked under the arch of the front wheel. He peered at the brand-new tread. ‘Actually, you haven’t got a torch, have you, love? I left mine back at the garage.’

  ‘Er – yes. I think so. It’s in the kitchen somewhere. Will this take long?’

  ‘Depends. Some clown might have just let the air out. If so, I’ll pump them up and you’re on your way. If they’re both punctured you’ll need two new tyres. I’ll be able to see better with the torch.’

  Elizabeth Drury scrunched back into the house, grateful for the warmth of her hallway. She kept a heavy-duty torch in the cupboard under the kitchen sink: rural locations were prone to power cuts in winter. She heard the front door snap shut and sensed someone behind her. She stood quickly and stared into the unblinking shark eyes of her mechanic.

  ‘What are you doing? You frightened me,’ she gasped, holding out the torch. Her eyes weren’t really blue. They were closer to grey, like the smooth stones licked to perfection by the sea.

  ‘I mourn with the widowed earth and will yearely celebrate thy second birth,’ said Crowan Frayne as he grabbed her neck with his gloved right hand.

  Elizabeth Drury, grey eyes wide with fear, panicked and lashed out with the torch, smashing Frayne squarely in the face. He staggered back, his nose bleeding, and she pushed past him, running into the hallway. He caught up with her just as s
he made it to the front door and dragged her, kicking and screaming, to the ground. She tore at his face and hair. She was strong and it took him some time to turn her over onto her front and push her face into the carpet. She screamed wildly, arms and legs flailing. One of her shoes fell off in the struggle and Frayne couldn’t stop himself from laughing at her stupid, stockinged feet. But now he had taken control. He held her face down with his left hand and had time to take a deep breath of her rich perfume before withdrawing the bloodstained claw hammer from his pocket. She stopped moving after the fourth blow, her body suddenly limp, the back of her head a tangled mess of blood and bone.

  ‘Bad hair day,’ said Crowan Frayne.

  He sat back, exhausted by the effort. The car scam had worked. He had called the NCRS breakdown line five minutes after Elizabeth Drury, claiming to be her husband and giving the correct address. He told the female telephonist that his wife had overreacted, that he could reflate the flat tyres himself and there was no need to send an NCRS recovery van after all. The telephonist had thanked him for calling back so quickly and cancelled the booking: there would be no charge. She then described the new NCRS all-inclusive international rescue package that covered the overseas motorist for ‘almost all continental breakdown eventualities’. He had told her to send the details by post.

  It had been a long night but Frayne’s head was alive, sparking with possibilities. The glittering, persuasive second stage of his conceit was looming. It was tangible now: the wrong could soon be corrected. The numberless dead cheered his daring, every particle of his being vibrating with their applause. He dragged Elizabeth Drury’s body to the foot of the stairs. A yellow-eyed tabby cat watched him politely through the wooden struts of the banister, its head tilted inquisitively to one side.