The Yeare's Midnight (31 page)

Julia couldn’t see anything, despite straining her eyes at the dark shadow of the clifftop. Her irritation at not being able to find Paul was rapidly being replaced with a profound sense of unease. The house was alive with strange sounds. She sat down in an armchair and gathered Paul’s dressing gown tightly around her.
Where
is
he?
She turned on a reading lamp and felt the chill air rush at her ankles as the kitchen door clicked open. Relieved, Julia jumped to her feet and, stepping quickly over the cold wooden floor, came face to face with her husband. He stood motionless in the centre of the kitchen: ill, gaunt and broken-hearted.

Underwood tried to order his thoughts through the pain that was gnawing at his insides. Japanese soldiers placed hungry rats on the stomachs of Allied prisoners of war and then covered the rats with metal tins. The animals chose the path of least resistance and ate their way downward. He felt that pain now: hungry rats tearing through his flesh, scrambling furiously over each other in their frenzy to escape. He gasped for air and steadied himself against the kitchen table.
Blood
in
the
bathwater
signifies
rebirth.
Why
do
you
need
two
left
eyes?
Dexter
would
know.
Alison
is
clever.
Ali
is
a
star:
sharp
like
salt
on
your
tongue.
Didn’t
Stussman
call
that
wit?
The
killer
would
appreciate
it.

Julia’s gut twisted into a knot of fear and pity.

‘John?’ He looked at her, through her and behind her. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

Underwood blinked away the madness and found his wife at the centre of his field of vision.

‘Hello, Julia.’

‘Where’s Paul?’

Underwood turned his head slightly towards the kitchen window. ‘Getting some air.’

‘What have you done?’ She was scared now. There was blood on his hands.

‘I thought the two of you needed some space.’ Underwood stepped in front of her as she made for the kitchen door. ‘So I created some.’

‘For Christ’s sake, John.’

‘I’m not going to hurt you, Julia.’

‘If you’ve hurt him, I’ll never forgive you.’

‘You wouldn’t, anyway. It makes it easier, doesn’t it? Gives you a reason to hate me.’

‘I’ve got plenty of those.’

‘I think you feel frustrated, disappointed, let down, blah, blah, blah. But you don’t
hate
me, Julia.’

‘I’m working on it – and you’re helping.’ She tried to push past him again. He held her wrist, firmly but without malice. He wondered how long he could hold her. She was strong and his energy was bleeding away. The rats were in his head now, scratching and tearing at his brain.

‘Do you remember what your mother said about me, when we got engaged?’ he asked.

‘John, let me go.’

‘She said that one day I’d break your heart.’ Underwood hacked agonizingly – dark strings of blood flew onto his free hand. He seemed surprised. The wreckage inside him was oozing to the surface. Julia watched in horror.

‘You’re ill. You’ve got to get help.’

Underwood swallowed the warm glue that hung in the back of his throat. ‘Was she right, Julia?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Right at the beginning. She could see how much you loved me. She knew I could never live up to that. She knew that I could never love you unconditionally like you did. She saw that something was missing. And you know, after a time, I realized she was right. I couldn’t.’

Julia felt tears of frustration and waste welling up behind her eyes, crawling up from the great cave of grief inside her. ‘Why not? Why couldn’t you? That’s how I loved you.’

‘That’s why.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I lied to you, Julia. I let you believe I was something, someone that I’m not. I made you love me. I didn’t want to lose you. So I gave you the person you wanted for as long as I could.’

‘Why have you never said this before?’

‘If you could see into my head you’d know. It’s a bad place to be.’

‘But why?’

He fixed her with a sad, hopeless gaze. ‘I don’t know,’ he said despairingly. ‘The things I have seen; the things I think. You wouldn’t want to go there. I locked you out. I didn’t want to ruin you with it.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘If you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me.’

‘That should be my decision, not yours. Besides, I know you better than anyone.’

‘Except me.’

A wave of anger washed over her. It was insulting of him to claim that she didn’t know him. She had spent twenty years with him.

‘You don’t know yourself at all,’ she said bitterly.

Underwood released his grip on Julia’s wrist and immediately missed the urgent spring of her pulse against his fingers. He knew she was gone. She was dead to him now. He would never touch her again. He sat down. He was falling through the
branches: there was no one to catch him. ‘Four dead bodies,’ he said quietly. ‘Lifeless, mutilated things reborn in tears and blood. Two of them, two women, had a bad thing done to them. Can you guess what?’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘He cut their eyes out. One from each of them.’

‘Oh God.’

‘That’s what I thought. Now, why do you think someone would do a thing like that? Do you think he collects them? Do you think he puts them in a jar as though they were pickled eggs?’

‘For God’s sake, John.’

‘Me neither.’ Underwood continued, ‘If he did, he’d have taken both eyes: left and right. So ask yourself, why would you need two left eyes, Julia?

‘Come on, Jules.’ Underwood was crying too. ‘Welcome to my head. I want you to understand.’ He felt a sudden urge to ram a knife into his chest and tear his tormented lungs out.

‘I’m trying to.’

‘So.’ He was coughing again. ‘One more time. What would happen, if I’d – say – removed old Pauly-boy’s eye, for example. Our killer likes poetry. Think aesthetics.’

She looked up in utter despair. ‘I don’t know.’

‘He’d need another one, wouldn’t he?’ Underwood was breaking up; like a satellite re-entering the atmosphere, he was burning inside and out, falling apart. ‘I wasn’t there for you and you replaced me. Same difference, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘I think it is.’

‘I didn’t replace you. I fell in love with someone else. It happens.’

‘So does shit.’

‘Now tell me where Paul is.’ She was more confident now. Underwood was crumbling before her eyes but as the wave of her anger receded it fizzed on tiny fragments of pity.

‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘If you could live life again, compress everything into a split second where you felt every emotion, thought every thought, what would you remember most vividly?’

‘John, I …’

‘Tell me.’ Beads of sweat gleamed on his forehead: some fell and spread miserably on the floor. ‘What would you remember?’ He tried to take her hand but she moved quickly away.

‘Loneliness,’ she said simply.

The eye of time focused on him suddenly. He felt pierced by its tragic gaze. ‘Me too,’ said Underwood, struggling for breath. ‘For in a common bath of teares it bled. I understand that now.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Paul’s on the beach path. I hurt him.’

‘I’ll get him. Please go now.’

‘Yes.’

Underwood coughed hard as he stood up and a new flame burned in his chest. Harder, hotter than before. Blood spat from his mouth. He gripped at his heart, trying to tear out the agony. The chair fell backwards as he staggered against the wall while the room began to spin in nauseating circles. The ground seemed to fall away from under him.

John Underwood collapsed in on himself and fell awkwardly to the floor.

It was 2.04 a.m. Exhausted and shaking, Julia had called the Norfolk police and an ambulance. Then, afraid of what she might find, she stepped out into the freezing night to look for Paul Heyer.

13 December

Heather Stussman lay awake, waiting for the dawn. She was a poor sleeper at the best of times but bad dreams had torn her night horribly apart. Knowing that there was a policeman outside the entrance to her rooms hadn’t helped. In fact, the rustling
of his newspaper and the occasional squawk of his police radio had woken her several times.

She was concerned for her career at least as much as for her physical safety. It had been a long, arduous climb up the academic greasy pole. Getting funding for her doctoral thesis had been tough, researching it had been tougher. Dredging up the discipline to haul through volumes of stodgy literary criticism and ancient monographs had been akin to a labour of Hercules. Her book had been similarly painstaking but at least it had enabled her to cast off the shackles of deference and forelock-tugging that had compromised her PhD dissertation.

Reconstructing
Donne
had given Stussman a certain notoriety but it had closed as many doors as it had opened. She had almost become the academic equivalent of soiled goods. A successful fellowship at Southwell was vital to restoring her credibility. This was particularly vulnerable in the USA where the intellectual establishment tended to have long memories and fragile egos. She had avoided writing book reviews in the British newspapers, despite receiving a number of lucrative offers, and concentrated instead on researching her next piece for the academic journals. But now her association with the New Bolden murders was becoming quite widely known across the university: in Cambridge bad news spread like an airborne virus. They would be queuing up to demolish her career. She would not get re-elected at Southwell and would have to go back to Wisconsin worse off than when she had left. Then Stussman thought of Elizabeth Drury and Lucy Harrington and felt horribly guilty, sickened by her own selfishness.

She walked through into her kitchenette and made a cup of coffee. She was nursing a mild headache induced by cognac and insomnia and the hissing of the kettle grated unpleasantly. The caffeine smacked her satisfyingly between the eyes and she returned to her lounge in slightly better spirits.

It was still dark outside. Britain seemed to run out of sunlight completely by the end of November. Clouds rolled low across Cambridge from the east, threatening to engulf the spires of King’s College Chapel. The reflected clouds would blacken the
Cam and turn it the colour of burned treacle. There had been a storm in the small hours and from her window Stussman could see that leaves and litter had been blown onto the lawn at the centre of the first quad. The trees in the college garden would be skeletal. Something was niggling at her. Was it something she had forgotten?

She turned on a desk lamp and slumped into her armchair.

She thought briefly of Underwood. He was an interesting character: polite and perceptive. She had registered his interest in her, too, had felt his eyes edging over her when he’d thought she wasn’t looking. Dexter had grown on her slightly. The sergeant’s brusque manner had annoyed her at first but Dexter had asked pertinent questions and made intelligent connections about the poetry. That was refreshing. Perhaps the friction had come from similarities between them, Stussman mused. After all, they were both outsiders in worlds that men dominated. Stussman wondered which one of them had been patronized and pissed on the most in their respective careers: it was a tough call.

The wind rattled her window and whined outside in the stairway. Four, maybe five months until spring: it was a depressing thought. Five months until colour and sunshine flooded back into the countryside. She had heard that Cambridge was beautiful in springtime: daffodils spreading in great yellow washes across the college garden. Bright cold mornings. Sunlight splashing onto the Cam. Life returning to the dead land.

When
is
the
world
a
carkasse?

Stussman felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand on end as the question suddenly snapped back at her. An idea. A distant corner of her memory began to fill with the light of recognition. Could it be?

She took her book of Donne’s
Songs
and
Sonnets
and flicked impatiently to page twenty-one. There it was. ‘A Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day.’ She tried to remain calm: had she guessed correctly?

It was a poem about loss, transformation and the author’s longing for annihilation. However, it was the title and setting of the piece that had sparked Stussman’s interest: both focused on
a specific day. Carefully, anxious not to embrace any premature conclusions, she picked up a pen and began to read the poem, making notes on each verse as she went:

‘Today is St Lucy’s Day, the darkest day of the year, and there are scarce seven hours of sunlight,’ Stussman scribbled onto her notepad.