The Yeare's Midnight (34 page)

Drury,
Elizabeth
J
appeared automatically in the prompt box.

Dexter paused. How had that happened? The computer was a mind-reader. She thought for a second and then cleared the prompt box. Again, she selected ‘D’ and then ‘R’ and again
Drury,
Elizabeth
J
popped into the prompt box. Dexter pressed ‘select’ and read the search results.

Dexter tried to marshal the thoughts that were flying at her. Dan was hovering nearby. She caught his eye and waved him over.

‘What’s up?’ he asked through his yellow teeth.

‘I have a question.’ She was trying to keep a lid on her excitement. ‘I’m doing an author search, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So, I clear the box like so …’ She clicked her mouse and deleted the text in the prompt box.

‘OK …’

‘And then I type in the name of the author I’m after.’

‘Correct.’

‘So here goes. D, then R.’

Drury,
Elizabeth
J
appeared again in the prompt box.

‘Why does that happen?’ Dexter asked sharply. ‘Why does a name appear in the box even though I’ve only typed in two letters? There must be loads of names that begin with D R.’

Dan nodded. ‘It’s a time-saving device in the software. It’s a default setting. When you typed in DR, the program defaulted to the last name beginning with DR that a user entered. In this case Drury. You’ve been looking for books by John Donne, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So watch this.’ Dan cleared the screen and typed in D, then O. Immediately,
Donne,
John
flashed up in the prompt box. ‘Do you see what I mean? You were the last person to type DO into the author search. So the program automatically reverts to its last search command that began with the same letters. In case you’re the same person coming back and repeating your search. Like I say: it’s to save time.’

Dexter nodded but didn’t speak.

‘Anything, else?’ Dan asked. Dexter shook her head slowly. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it,’ he added as he walked away.

Dexter wasn’t listening. She felt a cold rush of excitement and again typed in DR:

Drury,
Elizabeth J.

She was struggling to organize her thoughts.
The
system
defaults
to
the
last
entry
beginning
with
those
letters.
So
some
one
was
searching
for
Elizabeth
Drury’s
book
recently.
It’s
a
public
database.
Public
information,
like
the
newspaper
articles.
Has
the
killer
used
this
terminal?
All
the
Donne
books
are
missing.
Maybe
he
took
them.
He’s
clever.
He’s
local.
He
wouldn’t
want
his
name
and
address
in
the
library
records.
The
killer
used
this
library.
He
touched
this
terminal.
Fuck.
Can
they
lift
off
the
keyboard
or
the
computer
screen?
Jesus
Christ.
Think.
Think.
There
could
be
dozens
of
partial
prints
on
the
terminal.
But
what
if
one
matched
a
police
record
of
violent
offenders
or
housebreakers?

Dexter stood immediately and walked over to Dan. She told him to turn the computer terminal off and to stop anyone from using it. He did so and put dust covers over the screen and keyboard. Outwardly calm but shaking with nervous excitement, Alison Dexter pulled her mobile phone out of her handbag and walked out of the library’s main entrance.

She pressed her fast-dial button for the police station and waited for a reply. Rain streamed off the canopy over the library’s glass doors, rippling the puddles spreading on the pavement. She decided to finish the call before making a dash for her car. The line connected and Harrison answered.

‘Incident Room.’

‘Dexter here.’

‘What’s up, Alison?’

‘Get a print team down to New Bolden library. I think the killer might have used the computer terminal they use to find books.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘I’ll explain it later.’ She squinted up at the clouds that tumbled unhappily overhead. ‘There’ll be lots of prints on the keyboard but we might get a partial. Our man might have a record. It’s something.’

‘I’ll send one of Leach’s boys down. We might have to bring the machine in to the lab.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Are you coming back now?’

‘No. I’ll hang around here until the print team turns up. I’ve got some calls to make.’

She hung up. Now she needed Stussman’s phone number. Dexter reached into her bag for her notebook and rummaged among its contents. No notebook. She must have left it in the car. Rain hammered down hard on the concrete: it seemed to roar back at her. The noise reminded Dexter of standing outside Upton Park as a child and listening to the chants and roaring of the football crowd inside. If she ran to the car she would get soaked. Could she call Stussman later, when the rain had
stopped? That didn’t strike her as very professional: she was running the investigation now, after all.

‘Oh, fuck it,’ she muttered and dashed out into the rain. The car park was at the back of the library and Dexter tried to use the side of the building to protect herself from the brunt of the downpour. It made little difference. She was drenched almost immediately and felt water running down the back of her neck. She hated that feeling. It made her shiver.

Her Mondeo was parked under an elm tree about fifty yards from the exit barrier, sandwiched between an exhausted-looking Fiesta and a white van. She fumbled with her keys at the driver’s door. She could see the notebook on the passenger seat and swore at her stupidity. She would have flu now for sure: that was all she needed. Finally the car door opened and she leaned inside, stretching over the handbrake and reaching for her book.

Crowan Frayne stepped out from behind the Escort van. It was time. He seized the driver’s door of Dexter’s Mondeo and slammed it hard against her legs. Half inside the car, Dexter fell face down against the seat. The pain in her legs was agonizing and she felt a sudden surge of panic. She tried to extricate herself from the car but the door slammed again on her legs. She screamed for help: her right leg felt as if it was broken. It was bleeding, too: she could feel blood flowing warmly against her chilled skin.
Got
to
get
out
…
got
to
get
out.
Crowan Frayne was quickly inside the car. Dexter felt his weight against her back: the pressure was intense and she thought her spine might snap. She shouted for help but Frayne pushed her face into the upholstery. She couldn’t move. She steeled herself for the blow that she knew was coming.

‘It’s the yeare’s midnight,’ said Crowan Frayne softly.

Dexter, using her last vestiges of strength, twisted her head sideways and for the first time stared the killer of Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury in the eye.

‘You fuck …’ she gasped. ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’

Crowan Frayne tightened his grip on her neck. ‘I am every dead thing.’ He pushed Dexter’s face into the seat and punched her hard, twice, in the side of her skull. He knew that the cranial shell was at its thinnest by the temples and he had aimed his
blows with precision. Dexter’s body went limp. Crowan Frayne got out of the car and looked around. The car park was empty. The rain had kept everyone inside. He opened the back doors of his Escort van and dragged Dexter’s unconscious form along the side of her car. With an effort, he hauled her inside before climbing in himself and slamming the van doors shut behind him.

He crouched over her. Dexter was groaning softly, her leg bleeding onto the wooden floor of the van. Frayne reached into his toolbox and withdrew his roll of masking tape. He gagged her and bound her hands and feet. He then rolled Dexter onto her side and pushed her into a foetal position. He looped a length of washing line around her neck and tied the ends tightly to her ankles and her wrists. If she moved her hands or legs the cord would tighten around her neck. She was a cop and Frayne did not plan to take any chances with her.

He touched the wound on her leg. The blood felt warm. He held his hand up to the light and watched the fluid form into a droplet and hang in the air. Frayne thought of the millions of dead compressed into the tiny red stalactite. Just as all matter had burst from a tiny particle, infinitesimally small, so had the memories and goodness of a thousand generations of life been fused and dissolved into Dexter’s blood. He would bind them with his own in an infinite multiplication: a beautiful amplification of their intelligences. Frayne suspended the pendulous droplet above his open mouth, watched it ripen and bulge, then felt it drop onto his dry tongue.

Frayne savoured its metallic taste spreading in his mouth. He sensed electricity as he drew the goodness up into himself like his favourite laburnum tree.

Once he was satisfied that Dexter had been immobilized, Frayne climbed into the front seat of the van and reversed out of the parking berth. Following Dexter had been considerably easier than he had originally imagined it would be. He had noted her car and registration number outside Elizabeth Drury’s house after their first meeting. The thick traffic had slowed Dexter’s car and he had trailed her from the station to the hospital, back to the station and then to the library without incident.

Frayne swung his Escort 1.8d onto the large roundabout opposite the library and headed for the east side of town. Home.

Heather Stussman was angry and panicky. It was well after nine now and no one had called her back. She had called New Bolden police station three times already that morning and had still failed to speak to either Underwood or Dexter. She was confident that she had discovered something. That she had answered the killer’s question: when is the world a carkasse?

It
is
the
yeare’s
midnight
today,
she thought.
The
world
is
a
carkasse
now.
Today
is
St
Lucy’s
Day.
Someone
is
going
to
die
today.
Maybe
the
killer.
Maybe
me.

Was she going mad? Maybe she’d been mad to come to England in the first place. Heather Stussman had never really known fear before: a certain nervousness when her academic articles were published, maybe, but nothing like this. She had taken a small carving knife from her kitchenette and placed it in the pocket of her cardigan as a precaution. She held it with her right hand. The steel felt cold against her skin. There was another knife under the pillow of her bed. They didn’t reassure her. Neither did fresh-faced Constable Dawson who sat reading the newspaper outside the door to her rooms. In the US cops carried guns.

The college clock bonged once outside her window: it was nine-thirty. She would give them an hour. Then she would call again.

February 1967
New Bolden

Elizabeth Frayne died in childbirth. She had a weak heart that collapsed on her during labour. No one had known of its weakness and the doctors had been unprepared. One said it was a miracle that they managed to save the baby. Elizabeth was unmarried: she had kept the identity of the child’s father a secret.

The funeral was simple and immediate. Rain whipped bitterly across New Bolden Cemetery, whirling grit around the grave. Droplets of water gathered on the funeral casket, merging and rolling off the sides like tears as Violet watched. The open ground yawned in front of her. Violet wished it would suck her down in her daughter’s place. The ceremony was over in a matter of minutes. Two of Elizabeth’s friends from the library attended. Violet did not invite them back home afterwards.

She collected her baby grandson from her neighbours and took the boy inside. He was big: over nine pounds at birth and much heavier now. He burbled as she nursed him. How would she manage? Twenty-two years of struggle and she was back where she started: holding a baby and wondering what on earth she could do. Twenty-two years and she had made no progress. God had a dark sense of humour, heaping grief upon grief on her shoulders. She looked at the baby and thought for an instant that it was no more pathetic, no more vulnerable and helpless than she was: a molecule of water in a vast directionless tidal wave. She banished the thought.

She had agonized over whether to have the baby adopted. She was middle-aged, she told herself; she didn’t have the energy to start over again. She had faced disaster three times before: when she had become pregnant with Elizabeth, when Arthur had been killed and when she had lost her eye. On each occasion she had
looked deep into the abyss and, from somewhere, had summoned the will to fight on.