The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  A good meal would move things along nicely. ‘Oysters’ was a popular local restaurant and Paul was a big fan. The maître d’ showed them to a window table that looked out across the estuary and Paul ordered two gin and tonics.

  ‘It’s beautiful here, Paul,’ Julia breathed. ‘It’s so quiet.’

  ‘They’ve got a great menu, too. The sole is fantastic. They also do a cracking lobster. Caught locally every morning.’

  ‘I haven’t had lobster for about ten years.’

  ‘One of life’s great pleasures. I had a New England lobster in Boston once that I swear was hanging off the plate. It looked like an alien. I was actually quite scared of the thing in case it went for me.’

  ‘I bet it was good, though.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘I’d love to go to America.’

  ‘I’ll take you. If you survive a week of me in Norfolk, that is.’

  ‘I’m coping OK so far.’ She took his hand across the table. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve been on holiday.’

  ‘Too long, Julia. That’s behind you now. Let’s look forward. Be positive.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Julia Cooper sat back in her chair happily, again the giddy schoolgirl. ‘What about some wine?’

  ‘You choose.’

  ‘I’m hopeless. I don’t know many wines. You’re the expert.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Positive, confident Julia starts today.’ He nodded at the wine list. ‘Give me your best shot.’

  Julia scanned the list for something familiar. White wine with fish, obviously, but which one? There were so many. South African Chardonnay. That was a safe bet and easy to pronounce too.

  ‘The Pine Forest Chardonnay,’ she said boldly, folding the wine list shut with a flourish.

  ‘An excellent choice, Madame,’ said Paul in an affected waiter voice. Julia smiled and took his hand again as their gins arrived.

  Underwood hurried back to his car in a daze of anger, hurt and jealousy. He was careful to walk past the back of the restaurant, taking the long way round to the car park. He would drive to a spot closer to Heyer’s BMW and follow them. Drive through the darkness, lights off, unseen. Careful to keep a distance. Careful to be anonymous. They are both on edge. They would both recognize me immediately. Must be on my guard. Must stay invisible until I am ready for them. Ready to show them myself: explain what they have created in me. Reveal the monstrosity I have become. Make them understand. Make them fucking understand.

  He paused at a street corner. He was at the car park. Breathless and in pain, as if his lungs had burst in agony. He no longer coughed up slabs of phlegm but long strings of blood: the warmth clung in his throat. He hacked the strings into his mouth and pulled them out into his handkerchief. He was coming apart from the inside: dissolving into a shapeless bloody nothing. Underwood sat on a low wall and composed himself, brushing away the tears that felt so cold on his exposed skin. For in a common bath of teares it bled, he remembered, yes, tears that freeze with blood. Lucy Harrington’s one-eyed gaze; Elizabeth Drury’s last breathless panic to escape; Julia Cooper tied to a bedpost, wild-eyed with fear. Underwood wiped his face dry: every chilled tear was a horror.

  Underwood’s hand rested briefly on the bag of items he had brought with him. He had stopped at a garage in Holt to buy a few essentials: a roll of thick masking tape, some bin bags – and a hammer.

  He was hungry again. The infection in his lungs was draining his body’s strength, its ability and desire to fight back. He looked up. There was a fish-and-chip shop about fifty yards away. He ordered a bag of chips and two pickled eggs. Five minutes later, in the darkness of the car park, he slid half an egg into his mouth and imagined it was Lucy Harrington’s eye. He rolled it gently around his mouth, cleaning it with his saliva. He could almost feel the gouges with the sensitive tip of his tongue, the ragged hood of flesh where it had been torn from the socket.

  He placed the egg back in its bag and repeated the process with the other, this time remembering Elizabeth Drury: elegant even when floating in her own blood. He cleaned the egg with care, at one stage even taking the entire object into his mouth. It fitted perfectly. Suddenly he thought of Julia’s soppy green eyes rolling in pleasure as she writhed orgasmically under Paul Heyer. Underwood bit down hard on the egg. He imagined smashing down through the lenses of Julia’s eyes, snapping the ciliary muscles with his teeth. He relished the crunchiness of the cornea and the cold liquid of the aqueous humour that broke over his tongue like a liqueur. He swallowed hard.

  The wine had been excellent and the lobster enormous. Paul Heyer and Julia Cooper had no room for a dessert so they settled for coffee. By eleven-thirty, the restaurant was nearly deserted and Paul finally got the message from the awkward-looking waiting staff. He left a generous tip, shook hands with the maître d’ and walked back to his car, holding Julia’s hand. He was well over the legal alcohol limit but knew that the area was pretty thinly policed and, besides, he was still in control of all his faculties. The BMW started first time and Heyer steered the powerful car gingerly along the narrow road that led out of Blakeney and edged along the cliffs towards Wells. He concentrated so hard on the black road in front of him that he did not notice John Underwood’s Mondeo, following quietly behind him with its normally powerful headlights turned off.

  48

  Heather Stussman dined in the college hall. Although the prospect of another intellectual flaying at the hands of Dr McKensie filled her with gloom, she was tired of being kept prisoner in her own rooms. Besides, seeing the photographs of the murder victims at New Bolden police station had unsettled her: she wanted to be with people.

  As it happened, McKensie and his coven left her alone during the meal. Perhaps the presence of a uniformed policeman at the door made them nervous: skeletons jangled in everyone’s cupboards. After dinner, Stussman retired to the warmth of the Combination Room with a coffee and her battered edition of John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. The ancient room was almost empty and she sank gratefully into the security of a high-backed leather armchair in front of the open fire. A steward brought her the brandy she had requested at dinner and stirred the burning logs in front of her. Sparks flew high into the old stone chimney, glowing brightly orange before disappearing for ever.

  She tried to organize her thoughts. It was hard: comfort worked against her, it was seductive and distracting. She leaned forward in the chair and tried to simplify what she had spent her career complicating.

  What are the major themes that Donne addresses in his poetry? she asked herself.

  Love, Sex, Religion, Death.

  His poetry reflects the uncertainties of the time. It attempts to fuse religion with science. The humanist obsession with classical philosophy was also important. Indeed, the killer of Harrington and Drury had asked her about the music of the ‘spheares’. Donne was one of a number of writers who developed this notion from the early writings of Aristotle and Pythagoras.

  A log hissed and spat in the flames. Stussman jumped, despite herself. She looked around the room. Only Professor Proctor and Dr Wuff remained: both seemed at best semi-conscious, their eyes losing focus under sagging lids. The brandy tasted good and she rolled its fire around her tongue with relish. Cambridge had some advantages.

  So Donne’s poems were essentially hybrids: fusions of ideas that often contradicted each other. The poet’s own life had been something of a contradiction. Donne was born a Catholic, a descendant of the martyr Sir Thomas More, and yet he became a high-profile Anglican. Indeed, he ended up as the Protestant Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Was the killer religious, Stussman wondered? He had not referred to any of Donne’s overtly religious works. And yet, religious uncertainty was central to understanding the poet he had selected. Curious.

  She returned to her book and flicked to ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’. The killer had written a line of this poem – ‘Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare’ – on Lucy Harrington’s wall. Stussman s
hivered as she remembered the grisly photograph of Harrington’s butchered face.

  The poem is about separation. It’s a valediction: a farewell poem. The conceit is based on the idea of reflection. The two lovers are reflected in each other’s tears. The woman’s tears reflect the poet’s face and vice versa.

  Stussman frowned as an idea began to germinate. She reread part of the first stanza:

  ‘For thy face coines them, and thy stampe they beare

  And by this Mintage they are something worth

  For thus they be

  Pregnant of thee

  Fruits of much griefe they are, emblems of more.’

  It was a symbiosis. His tears are given meaning by her image. And conversely, his image gives purpose to her suffering.

  ‘Pregnant of thee …’

  Stussman remembered that other writers, contemporaries of Donne had used similar imagery: the idea that one appeared ‘as a baby’ in the eyes of a lover was not originally Donne’s. She had never considered the image in depth before. However, the meaning was obvious: we feel emotionally vulnerable and dependent when we are in love. We need unconditional love in return; just like a baby does.

  To whom do we show our vulnerabilities? To whom do we always appear as babies? Our partners, our parents – our grandparents, perhaps.

  Stussman stared into the red-gold depths of her brandy and saw her own distorted image wobbling back at her. She thought of her father, how he had stewed his genius in a brandy bottle, turned his liver into a brick. ‘Unravelling a poet’s mind is like trying to knit with spaghetti,’ he had told her once. She smiled at the memory. She missed him. She was always the baby in his tears.

  The dead girl is the killer’s conceit: the shocking imagery at the centre of his argument. In themselves, the victims have no other significance.

  ‘If those women meant nothing to you,’ Stussman whispered into her glass, ‘then who are you really saying goodbye to? Who gave meaning to your pain?’

  At the second murder scene the killer had left extracts from two poems: ‘The First Anniversary’ and ‘A Feaver’. Stussman flicked through her book.

  Both poems concern sick women: Elizabeth Drury is one of them, the identity of the subject in ‘A Feaver’ is not known but may have been Donne’s wife. Has the killer lost his wife? His mother, maybe? Is he trying to say goodbye to her? Are the murders some personal form of valediction?

  Stussman turned between ‘A Feaver’ and ‘The First Anniversary’.

  Both poems suggest that the world will cease to have meaning should the female subject die. In ‘A Feaver’ Donne even suggested that the woman’s disease would become a day of judgement for the world, that the very heat of her fever would consume the world in flames:

  ‘O wrangling schooles, that search what fire

  Shall burne this world, had none the wit

  Unto this knowledge to aspire

  That this her feaver might be it.’

  There were similar apocalyptic references in ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’ and ‘The First Anniversary’. So there were quasi-religious undertones after all.

  When is the world a ‘carkasse’?

  The question nagged at Stussman. The killer had asked it twice on the phone: it was clearly important to him. It seemed to imply a specific answer. Her head was spinning. Heather Stussman had always been better at understanding the structural and intellectual aspects of poetry than the emotions that underpinned it. She screwed up her eyes in concentration. She always told her students to focus on applying simple principles. If you don’t understand a poem then stick to what you know it is, not what you think it might be. Who wrote it? Who is it aimed at? How many stanzas are there? How many lines in each stanza? Do they rhyme? Is the language colloquial or contrived? What imagery does the poet employ? What is the single most important defining feature of the poetry?

  Wit.

  Donne wanted to dazzle his coterie with his wit: persuade them of his intelligence. His poems set an intellectual challenge that his audience were invited to attempt. She was his audience. He was challenging her.

  When is the world a carkasse?

  She was missing something and it irritated her.

  The candles flickered softly in the Combination Room. Faint shadows twisted and danced against the panelled oak, smudged and indistinct like cave paintings. Wind rumbled in the chimney and the fire began to wither and die. Proctor and Wuff had retired to bed. Heather Stussman downed her brandy and decided to do the same.

  49

  Whitestone Cottage stood alone on a clifftop about two miles outside Blakeney. A narrow, potholed track led from the main road to the cliff edge, bisecting a carrot field. The cliff itself was gradually tumbling into the sea, its soft red soil sloughing in great chunks down to the shingle beach two hundred feet below. There was a steep path, uneven and crumbling in places, that led from the field down to the beach. It was a lonely spot, desolate and cold. The black mass of the North Sea rippled vast and menacing beyond the square lines of the cottage. The buildings themselves would gradually fall into the waves below as salt water gnawed the ground from under them. However, for the moment the cottage was secure: its lights flickering weakly, like four burning cigarette tips trying to illuminate infinity.

  Underwood could hear the roar of the water below, the hissing of the pebbles: the forces of nature smashing relentlessly against stone. Rocks become smoothed by exposure, polished by vicissitude; their surfaces flawless to the touch. Underwood ran a stone between his fingers. Life had eroded his own smoothness; instead, it had made him ragged and ugly, smashed him into terrible splinters and blown them into the bitter winds.

  He waited twenty minutes for the lights to go off in the cottage. Then he returned to his car and collected his equipment. His chest seemed to have dried up temporarily: he no longer coughed up any blood or phlegm, although an uncomfortable cold sweat had broken out under his shirt. The digital clock in his car said 12:25. He slammed the door shut, crossed the main road quickly and hurried back along the track. There was a small shed at the back of the cottage and Underwood waited for a moment to catch his breath.

  A freezing cold wind that smelled of salt and tasted of dirt whipped across the water and slammed into the side of the cottage. Underwood winced and huddled in on himself. He looked up at the top windows of the house. Julia was in there screwing Paul Heyer. His wife, screwing someone else. He craned his neck slightly into the wind, trying to filter her moans and whimpers of pleasure from the rushing wind and water.

  ‘Oh my love you do me wrong’. Underwood’s dustbin bag full of equipment flapped accusingly as the gusts grew in ferocity. The tumbling air shouted derisively at him: ‘fucking your wife … he’s fucking your wife … by the sea … by the sea.’ She was right there, behind the vulnerable glass and the patterned curtain. Heyer’s sweat on hers, Heyer’s skin on hers. ‘To cast me off discourteously,’ whispered the wind. He would sing her a new song now. He would make her understand.

  Underwood made a dash for the kitchen door and crouched low, pressing against it. The sweat seemed to be freezing against his skin. It would be appropriate if he died here in this barren, dark wilderness; frozen against the door while his wife sweated and bumped against a sweating, heaving stranger inside. He looked into the keyhole. The key still sat in the ancient lock. He knew how to open it. ‘Lucy Harrington, famous swimmer, eyeball ripped from its socket,’ chanted the wind. The rhythm of the words pleased him ‘Lucy Harrington, famous swimmer, eyeball ripped from its socket.’ The key dropped to the floor and Underwood pulled it outside, under the door. He waited for the wind to die down for a moment and then quickly unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  The kitchen smelled of flowers and faintly of coffee. Underwood froze, pain searing at his chest, sweat running in icy rivulets down his back. He strained to hear any tell-tale signs of movement in the old house: it creaked and groaned back at him. Perhaps the noises came from Julia’s tired bones, Underw
ood mused, creaking as she worked them into new shapes of immorality. ‘There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle,’ he remembered: ‘knees up, Mother Brown, knees up, Mother Brown, knees up, gotta get your knees up.’ He looked around, afraid that his thumping heart might give him away.

  Smart new pots and pans hung on the kitchen wall above a large Aga cooker that looked like it had never been used. In the middle of the kitchen stood a huge oak table on which nothing was ever carved. Underwood smiled as he imagined the cliff falling away beneath him. He saw the kitchen underwater: expensive saucepans clanging at the rocks, crabs crawling out of the Aga. A huge spray of flowers sat on the table: lilacs, roses and orchids. Underwood pulled the petals from a rose and rolled them between his index finger and thumb. He felt the fluid smear onto his skin like blood or ointment.

  Paul Heyer had floated off to sleep immediately. He dreamed that the sea had stolen under the bedroom door, into the room, and was sucking them both away. They were falling. The ground beneath them was gone. He could see the waves reaching up for him, shouting his name, shouting his name. His eyes opened sharply. The phone was ringing downstairs. Julia stirred and mumbled something from the cusp of sleep and wakefulness. Paul rolled out of the bed into the chill room, pulled on a dressing gown and hurried downstairs. The living room had no carpet and the exposed boards felt freezing on his feet. The phone stopped ringing as he picked it up.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he cursed. He put the phone down and waited for it to ring again. It didn’t. Angry now, Heyer dialled 1471 and listened to the caller’s number as an electronic voice repeated it back to him. It was a mobile phone number that he didn’t recognize. He pressed redial and waited for the connection to be made. To his surprise, the shrill beep of a mobile phone rang out directly behind him. Paul Heyer swivelled in shock and surprise – and found himself staring into the eyes of John Underwood.