The Lake of Darkness (7 page)

He had no means of cooking anything, but he seldom ate anything cooked. On the floor stood a stack of cans of pineapple and pineapple juice and in the bookcase were the works of Aleister Crowley,
Meetings with Remarkable Men
and
Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson
by Gurdjieff, Ouspensky’s
A New Model of the Universe
, and
The Secret Doctrine
of Helena Blavatsky. Finn had picked them up in second-hand bookshops in the Archway Road.

As he was coiling the flex round the hot plate and putting it into a carrier bag, Finn heard Lena pass his door and go on up the stairs. She had been out all the morning at a shop in Junction Road called Second Chance, spending two ten-pound notes Finn had given her from the initial Anne Blake payment. Her movements were uneasy. He could tell by ear alone, by the sound of her feet on the stairs, her footsteps pattering across the landing, whether she was happy or afraid or whether there was a bad time coming. There hadn’t been a bad time for nearly two years now. Finn looked on her strangeness quite differently from the way most people did, but the bad times were another matter. The bad times had been brought into being by himself.

He took off the white cotton robe he wore for studying or meditating or just being in his room and hung it on one of the hooks. Finn had no mirror in which to see his long body, hard and white and thin as a root. The clothes he put on, jeans, a collarless grandad shirt, the velvet waistcoat, and the scarf with the coins on, had all been acquired by
Lena, as had the pearl-handled cut-throat razor with which he now began to shave. He could see his face reflected in the window pane which, if he stood back a little, the opposing brick wall made into a passable looking glass. Nevertheless, he cut himself. Finn, with no pigment anywhere except in those water-grey pupils, sometimes thought it strange his blood should be as red as other people’.s

Lena’s tiny living room was draped all over with her purchases, a mauve silk dress with a fringe round the hem, a man’s grey morning coat, a bunch of scarves, a pair of lace-up girl’s can-can boots, and several little skirts and jumpers. The budgerigar, temporarily manumitted, surveyed all this array from its perch on an art nouveau lamp standard. In a day or two Lena would sell all these clothes to another shop, retaining perhaps one garment. She nearly always lost by these transactions, but sometimes she made a tiny profit. When she saw Finn she recoiled from him, alarmed, inordinately distressed as always by even a pin-head drop of blood.

“You’ve been cut!” as if it had been done to him by someone else.

“Well, well,” said Finn, “so I have. Let’s cover it up, shall we?”

She gave him a lump of cotton wool that might have come out of a pill bottle or been the bedding of a ring. Finn stuck it on his chin. It smelt, like Lena’s clothes, of camphor. She had brought in with her, he saw to his annoyance, a local paper, the
Post
, and he knew at once the cause of her uneasiness. Her eyes followed his.

“There’s been a girl murdered in Kilburn.”

He opened his mouth to speak, guessing what was to come. She came up even closer to him, laid her finger on his lips, and said in a hesitant, fearful voice,

“Did you do it?”

“Come
on,”
said Finn. “Of course I didn’t.” The bird
flew down and clung to the hem of the mauve dress, pecking at its fringe.

“I woke up in the night and I was so afraid. Your aura had been all dark yesterday, a dark reddish-brown. I asked the pendulum, and it said to go down and see if you were there, so I went down and listened outside your door. I listened for hours but you weren’t there.”

“Give it here,” said Finn. He took the paper gently from her. “She wasn’t killed in the night, see? She wasn’t killed yesterday. Look, you read it. She was killed last Wednesday week, the fifteenth.”

Lena nodded, clutching on to his arm with both hands like a person in danger of drowning clutches a spar. The bird pecked little mauve beads off the dress and scattered them on the floor.

“You know where we were that Wednesday, don’t you? The day before my birthday it was. All afternoon and all evening we were in here with Mrs. Gogarty, doing Plan-chette. You and me and Mrs. Gogarty. Okay? Panic over?”

Ever since the Queenie business, which had also marked the onset of her trouble, Lena had supposed every murder committed north of Regent’s Park and south of Barnet to have been perpetrated by her son. Had supposed it, at any rate, until Finn proved it otherwise or someone else was convicted of the crime. From time to time there came upon her flashes of terror in which she feared his arrest for murders committed years ago in Harringay or Harlesden. It was for this reason, among others, that Finn intended to make his present enterprise appear as an accident. Had he known what he was doing in those far-off days, had he not been so young, he would have done the same by Queenie and thus saved poor Lena from an extra anguish.

“Panic over?” he said again.

She nodded, smiling happily. One day she might forget, he thought, when he took her with him to India and they lived in the light of the ancient wisdom. She had begun
rummaging through the day’s horde of treasures, the budgerigar perched on her shoulder. A cushion, falling out, was caught between an octagonal table and a wicker box. Few objects could fall uninterruptedly to the floor in Lena’s flat. She surfaced, grasping something yellow and woollen.

“For you,” she said. “It’s your size and it’s your favourite colour.” And she added, like any mother who fears her gift won’t be appreciated as it should be, “It wasn’t cheap!”

Finn took off his waistcoat and pulled on the yellow sweater. It had a polo neck. He got up and looked at himself in Lena’s oval mirror with the blue-velvet frame. The sleeves were a bit short and under the left arm was a pale green darn, but that only showed when he lifted his arm up.

“Well, well,” said Finn.

“It does suit you.”

“I’ll wear it to go out in.”

He left her noting down her new stock in the book she kept for this purpose. Finn had once seen this book. When Lena couldn’t describe a garment she drew it. He went down into his own room and collected his tool box and the hot plate in its carrier and his PVC jacket. It was just gone two. He went in the van but not all the way, leaving it parked in a turning off Gordonhouse Road at the Highgate end.

Finn had waited to do the deed until after the departure of the Frazers. They had moved out the previous Friday. Sofia lonides always spent Monday evening baby-sitting for her brother and his wife in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Finn didn’t mind being seen entering the house in Modena Road, but he would have preferred not to be seen leaving it. By then, however, it would be dark. What most pleased him was the turn for the worse that the weather had taken. From Saturday afternoon it had grown steadily colder, there had been frost this morning, and as he drove up Dartmouth Park Hill a thin snow had dashed against the wind-screen.
If the weather had stayed as warm as it had been on Saturday morning he might have had to postpone his arrangements.

Anne Blake’s flat was clean and tidy and very cold. One day, Finn thought, when he had developed his theta rhythms, he might be able to generate his own bodily heat, but that day was not yet. It would be unwise to use any of Anne Blake’s heating appliances, he must just endure it. He attached a 13-amp plug to the flex which protruded from the gas pipe behind the fridge and plugged it in to the point next to the fridge point. Then he put up the steps and climbed into the loft, carrying the hot plate. Up there it was even colder. Finn joined the flex on the hot plate to the flex, some five or six yards of it, that came out of the gas pipe. Down the steps again to test if it worked. It did.

Watching the coiled element on the electric hot plate begin to glow red, Finn checked over his plan for the perfect accident. She would come in at six, turn on the heaters, including the electric fire in her bedroom, maybe have a drink of some sort, then her bath. She might bring the electric fire into the bathroom or she might not, it mattered very little either way. Finn would be lying up in the loft on the joists between the trap-door and the water tank. When he heard her in the bath he would lift up the trap-door and drop the hot plate down into the water. Electrocution would take place instantaneously. The hot plate he would then dry and replace among the glass jars and the
National Geographic
magazines. Once more broken and unusable, what more suitable place for it? When all the arrangements of flex and plug had been dismantled, nothing remained but to plug Anne Blake’s bedroom electric fire into the bathroom point, switch it on and toss it into the bath water. Accidental death, misadventure, the fire had very obviously (a complaisant coroner would say) slipped off the tiled shelf at the end of the bath.

Finn felt no compunction over what he was about to
do. There was no death. He would simply be sending Anne Blake on into the next cycle of her being, and perhaps into a fleshly house of greater beauty. Not for her, this time, the human lot of growing old and feeble, but a quick passage into the void before giving her first cry as a new-born child. Strange to think that Queenie too was a child somewhere now, unless instead her unenlightened soul still wandered aimlessly out there in the dark spaces.

Clambering across the loft, he peered out through a gap between roof strut and tile to watch the fluttering snow. In the wind on the top of Parliament Hill grey trees waved their thin branches as if to ward off the cloudy blizzard. The sky was the hard shiny grey of new steel.

It was because he was at the extreme edge of the roof, lying down to look under the eaves, that he was able to hear nothing in the depths of the house below him. Soft-soled shoes treading the carpeted stairs made sounds too low to reach him. He heard nothing at all until there came the scrabbling of a key in the front door lock.

Finn might just have managed to pull the steps up in time and close the trap-door, but he wouldn’t have been able to push the fridge back against the kitchen wall or remove his open tool box from the middle of the kitchen floor. She had come home more than two hours early. He came across the loft and looked down through the aperture in the ceiling as Anne Blake opened the bathroom door and stood looking up, startled and annoyed. There were snowflakes on her bushy dark grey hair.

“What on earth are you doing up there, Mr. Finn?”

“Lagging the pipes,” said Finn. “We’re in for a freeze-up.”

“I didn’t know you had a key. It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

Finn didn’t answer, he never went in for pointless explanations. What now? She would never have her bath with him up there, otherwise he might have proceeded as
planned. He must try again tomorrow. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be quite safe to leave that mysterious lead proceeding from the gas pipe still plugged in. Finn descended. He wrenched off the plug, went back into the loft and disconnected the hot plate. It would be a good idea actually to lag those pipes, an excuse for being in the roof again tomorrow. He would go down and tell her he would return tomorrow with fibreglass wrap for the pipes.

Finn put the hot plate with the iron and trivet, packed up his tool box and came down the steps, pulling the trap-door closed behind him. He was sitting on the side of the bath, about to close the lid of the box when, across the blue-and-yellow papered hall, through the open doorway to the bedroom, he saw Anne Blake crouched down, her back to him, as she struggled to pull open the lowest drawer of a tallboy. Lying on the top shelf of the box was the largest and heaviest of his hammers. How easy it would be now! In just such a manner had he struck Queenie down.

He shut the box, slipping the hammer into his right-hand pocket. Then the box was on the bathroom floor and Finn was moving swiftly across the blue carpet towards her.

She was on her feet, clutching to her the two or three garments she had been groping for in the drawer, before Finn had so much as entered the bedroom. He stood still on the threshold and she seemed to find nothing untoward in his looks or his behaviour. She said rather ungraciously,

“Have you finished whatever you were doing up there?”

Finn nodded, fixing her with his pale eyes. He knew she was uneasy in his presence, but there was nothing new in that, most people were. Quite alone in the house with him for the first time, she was probably afraid of rape. Finn smiled inwardly. He wasn’t much interested in sex. It was more than a year since he had had anything to do with a woman in that way, and then it had been very sporadically.

He put the steps away and got into his jacket. It was still only four-thirty, but twilight. Anne Blake had turned some lights on and gone into the kitchen. The gas fire, just lighted, burnt blue in the living room grate. Finn still had the hammer in the pocket of his jeans. He went into the kitchen to tell Anne Blake about coming back tomorrow with the fibreglass, and while she talked to him, asking him what right Kaiafas had to a key to her flat and scolding him about knocking over something when he moved her fridge, he closed his hand round the hammer handle and thought, how easy, how easy … and how easily too he would be found out and caught afterwards, not to mention Lena’s terror.

She forgot to ask him to relinquish the key or perhaps she thought he had better keep it since he was coming back
the next day. It was still snowing when he got down to the street, but the snowflakes were now the big clotted kind that melt and disperse as soon as they touch a solid surface. Finn walked along Mansfield Road and under the railway bridge at Gospel Oak and got into the van.

Immediately, it seemed, that he had closed the door the blizzard began. The wipers on his windscreen weren’t what they had been and Finn decided to stay put until the snow stopped. It flopped on to the roof and windows of the van and streamed as water down its sides.

After about twenty minutes the snow had almost ceased but there was a big build-up of rush-hour traffic headed for Highgate West Hill. Finn couldn’t stay parked where he was and he couldn’t turn round, so he started the van and drove back the way he had walked. It was dark now but the street lamps were all on, and as he passed the end of Modena Road he saw Anne Blake leaving the house, holding a pagoda-shaped umbrella in one hand and a plastic carrier in the other. She turned in the direction of Hampstead Heath.