The Unblemished, page 7
They had needed to aestivate that long-ago summer, they told him; they could sense it would be a hot one. Despite his offerings, there seemed to be no change in the Queen’s condition and they decided they must preserve their energies until the inevitable occurred. He was to go into hiding for as long as it took. It had been hard for him to comprehend. He had struck out in this direction, driven by an instinct planted within him since birth, since before birth. He had killed nine children on a spree that lasted three years. The media storm that surrounded his activity did not impress him, nor his reputation as Britain’s most feared serial killer. He derived no pride from eluding the police, no consternation that the newspapers wrongly accused him of eating his prey. All that mattered to him was the means to an end.
Thirty years on, that end was here, but not in the way he had envisioned it.
He knew he must leave soon, because although She was dead, Her replacement would need to be found. A return to strength was not out of the question, but it could not happen while he was decaying in a collapsed, forgotten barn. What was important was the quality of his flesh, the commitment, the speed and efficiency of the kill. What really mattered was how they read his dedication, his passion. He must return.
He rose from the uncomfortable metal camp-bed with its thin mattress and death-grey blanket. He walked the three paces to the shattered door that separated him from the corridor.
He ran his hands through his hair, felt the soft stubble on his chin. Long hair now, turning silver – he could see it if he pulled it in front of his face. He would not cut it, although he shaved regularly, religiously. He had not seen himself in a mirror for so long he had begun to doubt that they had ever existed. Mirrors seemed too fantastic to him to be true, like the technology they used to show on Tomorrow’s World. He had forgotten what his own face looked like, even as he traced the blunt blade of his straight-edge razor over its planes and curves and runnels. Even if he could remember, it would have changed beyond recognition now. Thirty years without being able to stare into his own eyes, question himself about what he had done with his life, demand some answers, some confirmation that he was on the right track, no matter what. It was difficult to keep focused when there was nothing to focus on any more.
What did he miss from normal life? Really, there wasn’t that much. A pint and a paper, the odd football match, a blow-job, a curry, and the feel of a cricket ball in his hands. Once he had been a fair cricket player, a bowler, able to swing the ball in or out depending on the state of the wicket, the state of the ball, the moisture in the air. Once he had been in love. Once he had thought about fathering children, rather than eating them. Destiny ruined your choices, ruined the notion that you ever really had any choices in the first place.
The only thing that hurt him was wondering about his mother, dead a long time now, but not so long that she didn’t know her son was a beast. Now and then it pinched him to imagine her holding him as a newborn, kissing his forehead, wondering at the size of his fingers, the softness of his skin. He would have been faultless in her eyes. His laughter would have brought her to the edge of tears, his simple look of need and love from his cot in the morning when he wakened would have given her belief in God.
When did you become disappointed in your offspring? Was there ever a time? When they grew obnoxious with teenage hormones, defaced by acne? Or were you always in thrall to them despite the way the dice fell? You sent them letters and cards professing love even while their irritation with your parochial life threatened to choke them. No detail, no matter how boring to them, was anything less than fascinating to you.
Time, studied in this way, was of immense interest to him. There was a poignancy in seeing the thrum of his heartbeat in the soft skin of his wrist and remembering a moment when a girlfriend from his teens pressed her tongue against the same spot after they had made love. Looking at that pulse in his skin made him feel that no time had passed between then and now. You grew older, but your memories kept you young. You could always be a virgin if you wanted it.
He touched his fingers to his eyes; he felt the tender flesh, the minuscule network of wrinkles and the way his tears filled it. He thought of death and love and the way the two were so intertwined that it was difficult to untangle them in his thoughts. He had killed but he had loved, too. Did that make him a bad man?
Death. It was both an end and a beginning. Tears were just his way of showing some respect.
He moved, as best his tired limbs would allow, to the part of the corridor where the wall gave itself up to the sprawling forest. He remembered a news programme he had listened to on the radio, not long after going into hiding. One of the ten-a-penny psychologists was talking about what Salavaria was really like, how a fiend like that functioned, how he had slipped the widening net persistently over the years. That he would never make eye contact because he must have the kind of penetrative eyes that people remembered.
The psychologist said he must be a very lonely man. But Salavaria had never felt that way. He felt separate. Intended. Chosen. Different. He was a link between the past and the future.
Nonsense from these psychologists – a breed of repellent, indecorous creatures who were regularly called upon to spout forth over wars and TV reality shows – did not impinge on him. When these so-called experts opened their mouths to speak, Salavaria sent his mind elsewhere. He imagined the purse and slither of other mouths as they talked their rot, and remembered the flavour of Rhiannon Tate’s freshly harvested kidneys, poached by the heat of her fear. He remembered the softness of Lisa Kerwin’s throat under his fingers and the yield of her trachea, like a Styrofoam cup. He remembered the almost supernatural sweetness of Debra Finnegan’s blood. He drank so much of it that his piss turned to treacle for days after.
The forest both stretched out around him and muscled in on his space. It was a paradox he loved. In many ways, he saw himself as the forest. He was patience and frustration; ancient and modern; strength and fragility. He had been here so long he had become a part of the forest. And somewhere beyond it, things were in motion; there was a way back, if he wanted it. He realised he did, very much.
The taste of hot meat. It would soon be back in his mouth, filling his nostrils with copper. The special flavour and texture. For the first time in three decades, he became impatient about having to wait.
5. NICE WORK
‘I’M JUST GOING out for a few minutes. Then we’ll have dinner, okay?’
Claire regarded her with incomprehension, as if her mother had asked her to do something immoral or had spoken in a foreign language. Sarah brushed her fingers against her forehead and left the room, hesitating a moment at the threshold before turning the key in the lock. As she walked along the road leading out of the village, guiltily enjoying this moment of freedom, she felt bad about shutting her daughter in. What if there was a fire? What if Claire wanted to nip down for a glass of milk and found herself imprisoned? She might freak out, throw herself through a window. Sarah angrily shook away these thoughts, annoyed that her daughter’s behaviour was turning her into such a drama queen. She had once never had nightmares, or black thoughts about depression, disease, or death, but now the moments before sleep seemed to be filling up with misery. She would see herself toppling off the roofs of tall buildings, or falling in front of express trains as they passed through stations. She watched herself be eaten by thin, rabid dogs. She observed a madman in a scarlet mask gutting her with a bowie knife. It seemed to be a price she must pay for relaxation, no matter how feeble.
She found the junk shop on a lane so small it didn’t have a name. A porch was filled with dusty paperbacks for ten pence each. Inside was all dust motes and worn floorboards. More bookcases were lined along flaked, peeling walls but were so obscured by old furniture that she couldn’t read the spines. A bowl of cat food was positioned by the door. Clutches of tarnished silver cutlery were held together with elastic bands for £5 a pop. Chipped saucers cradled mismatched nuts, bolts, screws and nails, or defunct currency, or marbles, thimbles, buttons, matchbooks. There was no great care given to any of the artefacts, no sense of order, yet Sarah got the impression there was a lot of affection for what was being sold, and guessed that the owner knew where everything was to the last inch. The smell was that ancient, musty aroma of steady, incremental deterioration.
She loved the place. In the far corner, a counter separated a small office from the rest of the floorspace. On it were positioned a vintage cash register and a tiny brass bell, for customers to ring. It was getting near six and she guessed the junk shop would close soon. True enough, as she reached out for the bell, a tidy man with a small goatee beard, maybe just this side of sixty, ducked out of the office, his hands holding two lever-arch files, a bunch of keys dangling from his mouth. He was wearing a grey cable-knit sweater, a pair of black jeans and a stone-coloured woollen beanie. His eyes crinkled a little when he saw her; he held up a forefinger. He placed the files on the counter and retrieved the keys.
‘Yes, miss?’ he said. She decided she liked him instantly, and not just because he might have a job for her. His face reminded her of her father’s, lined but pleasantly open, still retaining a childish quality.
‘You must be Ray.’
‘I must be.’
‘My name’s Sarah. I’m, uh, a friend of Nick Skeaping. He said you might have a job for me.’
Within five minutes they’d shaken on her appointment. She was to begin the next day. ‘This means I get to go fishing with my boy without feeling guilty about shutting up shop,’ he said. She was only sorry that he wouldn’t be around to chat with during the workday.
On the way back to the hotel she bought a bottle of Cava to celebrate. Work, a roof over their heads, a young man flexing his muscles for her, the sea. It had taken a day for her to swing between the scales of no hope and promise. She wanted to get drunk and dance with Claire. Hug her until she popped. Emboldened by her good fortune, she was adamant that she would get the girl right again. Claire could help in the junk shop, creating a proper inventory. Together they would breeze through the place and freshen it up, give it some youth, some vibrancy. Hard work might be just the panacea Claire needed.
A dozen steps short of the hotel she felt her chest leap into the back of her throat. A police Rover was parked next to the Alfa Romeo. A police officer was inspecting the car, leaning in close to the passenger window to have a look inside.
She could come clean, have it out with Manser through the courts, perhaps escape without punitive measures being taken against her. But she knew she was stupid to hope. She had no evidence against Manser. If they both walked free, he would kill her, maybe even on the steps of the court buildings, and then Claire was his to ruin how he liked. It didn’t matter that she would lose the car. It had done its job for them. It was just another thing from her past that she had to turn her back on – something she was getting used to, but she hoped it would be the last thing she was forced to abandon.
6. FAST FOOD
AS IF IN some awful act of sympathy, the sky had turned out in similar colours to those erupted from the grave of Leonard Wright. Precious little, in a body two weeks dead, contains any vibrant hue; the mush spread around the disinterred corpse bore the monotone consistency of wet newspaper. Despite that, the bite marks were still visible.
This was how Bo envisaged it, as he took refuge in Sammy Dyer’s Volvo, not for the first time wishing he owned a car of his own, rather than the motorbike. From where Bo was sitting he could see Sammy, occasionally leaning over the porridge of the body. His camera flash went off intermittently, moments of bright excitement to lift what was otherwise a terribly grey kind of crime.
His own fingers itched to be holding a camera out there with his friend although he wasn’t sure how equal to the task his stomach might be. Sammy was the unshockable type. He had once brought to a party a sheaf of pictures he had taken at the home of a suicide. The victim had shot off the top of his own head, somehow preserving the face beneath it; the brain was photographed where it had landed, ten feet away on a bookcase, like some unusual grey knick-knack. The young man’s expression was what stayed with Bo. He looked as if he had just been told a joke he couldn’t quite understand.
Bo wound down the driver’s window. He could hear the sound of the shutter release even from here, such was the respectful quiet, and it carried a strangely queasy note that he had never noticed before.
The camera captured its undignified rectangles of atrocity, which would have to be experienced again, later, in the darkroom as they surged out of the developing chemicals. Well, they would if Bo was doing the work. Not for the first time did he rue the many opportunities he had had to switch to digital equipment, as Sammy had done. Bo’s argument that prints from film contained better detail was wearing thin, especially with the new breed of cameras that were being introduced. And the downloading of bits on a computer screen would be a lot less personal, a lot less in your face. He wouldn’t have to get his fingers wet. But then, his way meant that you were always holding something incontrovertible. Computers were unreliable things. Data loss was a phrase he had heard more often than he felt comfortable with. And he loved all the paraphernalia that the geeks didn’t get to play with: the little plastic tubs that contained the film, the glassine bags, the stop baths, the stirring rods and lint-free cotton gloves, the stainless steel tanks, the offcuts of cardboard he used for dodging and burning; but most of all he loved the hands-on element of it all, the excitement of manipulating an image, watching it ghost out of the developer.
Thinking of Keiko while he watched Sammy tiptoe around the grave and its dispersed resident was no help. He imagined that what was being photographed was her, under that maddeningly soft, warm skin. Eventually, she was this. But minus the bite marks, he hoped.
Sammy spent another twenty minutes documenting the attack, while black clouds built up behind him. When he’d taken more pictures than seemed necessary, he stowed the camera in his bag and left the forensics team to their painful deconstruction of the crime scene. Laurier and the other police officers were drinking tea from paper cups. The Detective Inspector poured Sammy one from a Bob the Builder flask, which was gladly accepted. Bo got out of the car and ambled over. No tea was offered. There were a few perfunctory introductions but nobody was really paying attention. It was a nasty morning and even these hardened coppers were cheesed off with how low people could get.
Bo looked back over his shoulder at the white figures bent over the spoilt body. Beyond them, like targets lined up on the wall, the head and shoulders of a dozen rubberneckers. They were hunched, almost fearful beneath the slate-coloured scudding.
‘Any ideas?’ he asked. ‘What about the bite radius?’
Laurier’s cup froze on its journey to his mouth. ‘Bite radius? What the fuck are you? Richard Dreyfuss?’
‘I was just –’
‘– being a knobend. That’s what you were just,’ Laurier said.
‘I was just showing an interest. Trying to help.’
Laurier’s face screwed up as Bo talked. Bo realised he’d be better off not saying anything. This was a man who would take the piss out of his own mother. ‘You’re a photographer. You take pictures. That is help enough. Try not to have a brain while you do that. Your opinions are as much use as a eunuch’s cumbucket.’
Bo reached out and poured himself some tea from the flask. Nobody objected. Possibly because it tasted like piss anyway. He turned his back on Laurier and strolled away, trying to look as though Laurier’s lack of generosity had nothing to do with it.
Bo finished his tea in Sammy’s car, watching the brutal tableau become softer with the steam as it clouded the window. Just before it was obliterated completely, Bo reached out and swiped clear a path with his sleeve. He had noticed something, despite only vaguely observing what was happening in front of him, as his mind still fretted over Vero and the constant pains in his hand. He had noticed a figure, off to the left of the ghouls trying to find something to spice up their table talk that evening. Tall, with glasses that caught the light and turned his eyes to silver coins. A beaten corduroy jacket and a brown leather document holder clasped primly between both hands. Something about him seemed familiar, but not in any way that was comforting. There was threat and reverence lifting off that figure. Even at a distance where he couldn’t be sure, Bo thought the other man was keeping an eye on him.
He swallowed the rest of his tea and got out of the car. He reached for his Nikon and fired off a couple of shots. Immediately the figure turned and walked away. By the time Bo reached the spot where the figure had been standing, he was gone.
Feeling strangely embarrassed and cheated, and somehow prickly with proximity, as if the man were still there in some unexplained way, he returned to the Volvo, where Sammy was stowing his equipment, and said his good-byes. He got on his motorbike and started the engine. He drove back to his flat automatically, and would have been incapable of relating any of the mundane incidents that occurred between Kensal Green and Shepherd’s Bush had he been asked.
He had not disclosed to Keiko any of what had happened, and certainly nothing of his suspicion that he was being followed. He didn’t want to alarm her, believing there to be shadowy figures capering in the streets outside her window. He wondered if he was going insane. He rubbed the raw, purpuric weals on his hands and decided no. Keiko had not discerned any difference in his behaviour, and she knew him better than anyone.
His front door closed behind him, Bo made his way immediately to the rear of his apartment where his dark room was positioned. It was a cramped area, little more than a reclaimed nook beneath the stairs, but he had sealed it off well and rerouted a couple of pipes to give him access to cold running water.
He set up his developing trays and switched on the safelight. Unloading his camera, he thought of the way the man at the wall had seemed imprinted over the scene, an all too obvious addition. He appeared too glossy, super-real. Bo scrutinised the negative for the frames he needed and fastened it into the holder. Once he had exposed the negs to light, he began the process of developing prints. He moved quickly and easily in the hot, cramped space, his mastery of the tools he used so complete that he worked almost on autopilot. Once he had a batch of half a dozen prints ready, he switched off the safelight and ducked out of the chamber. He poured a glass of milk and seated himself at the kitchen table, then scrutinised the prints for some hard evidence of the strangeness he had experienced. He didn’t have to look too hard.
