The Yeare's Midnight (29 page)

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 sug
gested
that
the
woman’s
disease
would
become
a
day
of
judge
ment
for
the
world,
that
the
very
heat
of
her
fever
would
consume
the
world
in
flames:

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.

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, Underwood
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.

‘What the bloody hell?’ He dropped the phone as a sharp
blow struck him squarely in the face. He fell backwards onto the sofa. Underwood was on him quickly, slamming the side of Heyer’s head with the wooden grip of his hammer. Heyer slumped, bleeding, to the floor. Underwood gasped for breath in the heat of his triumph. The surprise in Heyer’s eyes had been a joy to behold. He gathered his strength and hauled Heyer’s wheezing body into the kitchen.

Julia Underwood had been vaguely aware of background noises, but the softness of the double bed had drawn her back into a deep sleep. Even the buffeting wind at the window and the muffled crashing of the sea didn’t bother her. In fact, she found it comforting – hypnotic, almost. She turned over and dreamed of music.

Underwood tied Heyer’s hands and feet tightly with rope and dragged him from the house. The spiteful air tore at Underwood’s clothes as he hauled the groaning man to the cliff edge. It was only twenty yards but it required a monstrous effort: the sweat seemed to freeze against his skin like water frosting against glass. The pain was driving at Underwood’s chest, seemingly growing more acute with every heartbeat. His thoughts scattered in all directions like chickens evading a fox.
Concentrate.

Underwood pulled the prone form closer to the cliff edge, until Heyer’s head hung – face down – over the precipice. Blood streamed from his head wound and fell in dark beads into the void. The terrifying drop made Underwood nauseous but his fury drove him on; the hissing of water on the rocks seemed deafening to him now. It was as if the taste of Heyer’s blood had excited the waves into a fury of hunger; they were reaching for the wife-fucker, begging to pull him down with them and tear the flesh from his adulterous bones.

Underwood hesitated. The moment had come. He had to decide. He had the power to reduce Heyer to his elemental parts: smash him back into water, iron and carbon, reduce him to silt and fish shit. He could dissolve Heyer into the waves.

The thought was stimulating. When the sunlight evaporated the sea water, he would watch Heyer rise with the steam, he would deride the blackening clouds and mock the man that he’d imprisoned there. When the rain fell from the sky, he would stand agape and feel the droplets splash Paul Heyer onto his tongue. He would drink himself turgid and piss the bastard back into the sea, entomb him in the cycle for ever.