The Yeare's Midnight (20 page)

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 breathe. 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.

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.

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 she 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.

‘She to whom this world must it self refer / As suburbs, or the Microcosme of her,’ said Crowan Frayne to the cat between gasps.

‘Shee, shee is dead; shee’s dead; when thou know’st this / Thou know’st how poore a trifling thing man is,’ the cat replied.

Dawn was finally breaking up the night sky into fragments. Frayne tried to clear his head, to restore his focus. He left Elizabeth Drury’s broken body at the foot of the stairs, opened the front door and walked outside. He drove his van around to the side of the house so that it would be invisible from the road and quickly returned to the warmth, carrying his ophthalmic surgery kit. He needed to work accurately and fast: Elizabeth Drury would be missed.