The Yeare's Midnight (38 page)

He had said that he was planning to visit her. That this was her chance to live. Calling the police would be a huge risk. He would kill Alison Dexter for sure and offer Stussman’s name to the tabloid press. She could not let that happen. Heather Stussman had built her academic reputation piece by exhausting piece. It had been a tortuous process, driven only by her instinctive desire to succeed, like a salmon swimming against the flow of a thick black river. It was her entire life. Without her reputation what would she do? Go back to Wisconsin, probably, but then what? She would be unemployable and, worse than that, she would be notorious.

If
you
are
certain
of
your
arguments
then
you
will
not
come
to
any
harm
. He would say that, though, wouldn’t he? Stussman mused. She thought again of ‘A Nocturnall on St Lucies Day’. The killer had quoted from it again as he hung up:
‘And
I
am
rebegot
of
absence,
darkness,
death,
things
which
are
not.’
He
was obsessed with annihilation, self-destruction, nothingness. If, as Stussman had previously suspected, he planned to kill himself, perhaps she could encourage him in the act. She sat down at her desk and wrote on a piece of college notepaper:

She folded the note carefully inside an envelope, sealed it, addressed it to Sergeant Harrison, New Bolden CID and wrote the phone number of the Incident Room at the top edge of the envelope. It wasn’t much of a contingency plan but it was better than nothing. Stussman opened the door of her rooms and smiled down at her blue-uniformed sentry.

‘I’m going to drop this letter at the porter’s lodge,’ she said. ‘Then I am going to the college library for an hour or two. I’ll be quite safe. It’s within college grounds and there will be plenty of students there.’

‘I’m supposed to stay with you, Dr Stussman.’ PC Jarvis was young and eager not to screw up.

‘There’s really no need. No offence, but I won’t be able to work with you sitting next to me. Wouldn’t you be better off here? In case he calls or turns up, I mean. He’s not likely to attack me in the library in front of the entire college.’

‘I guess not. All right, Dr Stussman, but please don’t leave the college site without telling me first. Would you like me to walk with you to the lodge?’

‘You’re very kind but there’s no need. I’ll leave the room open. Help yourself to tea.’ She smiled her most dazzling smile at him and PC Jarvis melted like hot butter.

Stussman hurried down to the porter’s lodge. The air was bitterly cold. Tiny flakes of snow drifted across the stone quadrangle like ash from a distant bonfire. The newly refurbished lodge was centrally heated and the warmth enfolded her as she stepped inside. Johnson, the head porter, was hanging room keys on the board behind the front desk.

‘Johnson, can I ask you an important favour?’

The head porter twisted the right side of his mouth into a sardonic knot. He put down his pipe on the wooden counter. ‘That’s why I am here, Dr Stussman.’

She handed him the envelope. He read the name of the addressee with interest.

‘I have to leave the college for a couple of hours on police business. You’ve heard the rumours, I’m sure.’

‘Every one of them.’

‘Good. You’ll understand the importance, then.’ She looked Johnson in the eye, using her toughest stare. ‘Listen. If I have not called you by six p.m. today I want you to call Sergeant Harrison on the number I have given and read him the contents of the envelope.’

‘Open it, you mean?’

‘Obviously. This is a matter of life and death, Mr Johnson. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.’

The head porter nodded and carefully placed the envelope in the breast pocket of his blazer.

‘What about the young police gentleman on your staircase?’

‘He’s in my room. We … we are expecting the killer to call.’

‘Very well, Dr Stussman.’ He tapped his pocket and winked at her. ‘I shall wait for your call.’

‘Thank you, Mr Johnson. I knew I could depend on you.’

‘Always, madam.’

Stussman nodded at him and then stepped back outside. Into the oven.

Marty Farrell had been lifting prints from the New Bolden library computer for nearly four hours. It was a painstaking process. The machine was covered with dozens of latent prints. He started with the keyboard, carefully dusting and brushing black non-magnetic powder onto the surface of each of the keys to highlight the tell-tale oils in the fingerprints. He lifted the
prints from the surface by pressing adhesive tape against the powder. Farrell then used a special camera to photograph the imprints on the tape. The procedure took time and he knew that time was a critical factor now. There were some faint latent fingerprints that the powder was unable to clarify. On these he used a small laser that caused the perspiration in the prints to glow a mysterious yellow. These too were photographed.

The problem was not so much finding the prints as separating them. The library computer was used by the general public and dozens of greasy-fingered people had used it. The fingerprints were smudged and overlaid on top of each other on many of the keys. The smudging was so bad on the mouse buttons that lifting individual prints was virtually impossible. Still, Marty Farrell persevered and by 4.30 p.m. he had lifted and photographed seventeen reasonably uncorrupted partial and whole prints.

He knew that attempting to identify each of them in turn could take hours so he acted on the suggestion that Harrison had made to him that morning. On a piece of paper Farrell wrote down:

He then cross-referenced the constituent letters of the two names with the locations where he had found each of the prints. This allowed him to prioritize more effectively. He would concentrate his attention on the more uncommon letters from which he had lifted a fingerprint. He decided to start with Z, H, D, R, and Y. In total, he had taken nine partials from those letters. He might not be able to secure the court-required sixteen-point match but at this stage that wouldn’t be necessary. At this stage he just needed a name. And a break.

Marty Farrell scanned the photographed prints from Z, H, D, R and Y into his computer and, brushing the sweat from his brow, began to look for possible matches in the police fingerprint records with the two whorl-patterned prints he had lifted from the Z key. The clock marched inexorably towards five o’clock.

December 1999

Violet Frayne’s final act had been to kiss her grandson’s forehead. She fell back and breathed a last, tired breath: her grey hair was spread out on the pillows of her hospital bed. Then she was gone. Crowan Frayne watched her closely. He had hoped to see her spirit quit her body with that final resigned breath. Instead he saw nothing and felt only the gradual relaxation of her grip on his hand. He was alone, absolutely without meaning. A nothingness without form or direction.

He leaned forward and brushed his grandmother’s hair back from her face. Beside the bed were the flowers and plants that he had brought her. Crowan Frayne pulled some petals from the African violet and scattered them softly over the pillow. He reached for her treasured leather-bound book of Donne and turned to the page that he had selected for this moment.
Sotto
voce,
below the hum of machines and the clatter of the ward, Crowan Frayne began to read from ‘The Extasie’:

To his frustration, he could read no further. Tears welled up in his eyes and he squeezed them back, swallowing the pain in deep acid draughts as he always had. He had disappointed her in death as he had failed her in life. She was the intelligence: the angel that had moved his physical and intellectual cosmos. She had given the spheres their strange and beautiful music, put
poetry into his darkest, most senseless thoughts, bound his thoughts with hers on one double string. Violet Frayne had fired the alchemy that was glowing now in his soul: Frayne could see the divine in the mundane, music behind the terrible vastness of space and time, celebration in desecration, the yoking of opposites. Wit in horror.

Like a billion burning magnets, his thoughts sought connections. Some were unusual and disturbing, as if terrible predators swam in the dopamine and serotonin that connected his neural transmitters and receptors. Monsters hid between his cells and in the electrical pulses of his thoughts. What if they were the spirits?
‘As
our
blood
labours
to
beget,
Spirits
…
that
subtile
knot
that
makes
us
man,’
Donne had written. The spirits lived in human blood and communicated the brain’s instructions to the body. What if monsters, abominations of time and evolution, deformed and malignant, were the binders that united his mind with his body?

The thought dug like a scalpel at the matter of his brain. Could he marshal those monsters to celebrate her? Could he use their alchemy to convert the banality and ugliness of the life she had endured into the rarefication of beauty that she deserved in death? When he had smashed the glass eyes he had turned her agonies inside out. He had snagged the monsters that dwelt in her blood and hauled them writhing to the surface. She had injected beauty into his soul and he had revealed her ugliness in return. He despised himself for that. He would make amends.

Crowan Frayne kissed his dead grandmother’s hand and promised he would make her beautiful again.

‘You’re a sick man, Mr Underwood,’ said Dr Barozzi as he read the inspector’s charts. ‘You are lucky to be alive.’

‘I know.’ Underwood’s head still swam with exhaustion and
traces of drugs. Clarity was beginning to return, however, like fresh air circulating in a dark stuffy room.

‘You have had a minor heart attack. Your signs are now stable.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You have a severe infection of the pleural membrane in your left lung. This has put a huge strain on your cardiovascular system. How long have you had this lung infection?’

‘A long time.’ Underwood’s throat was dry and painful. It hurt to talk.

‘Six months?’

‘More.’

‘A year?’

‘Perhaps.’

Dr Barozzi shook his head slowly. ‘Your left lung is a mess. It’s dog meat, to be blunt. You have let this go much too far. Men of your age have to take care of themselves. You have put your heart under terrible strain through your own negligence. It’s like taking the pin out of a hand grenade, then jumping up and down with it in your breast pocket.’ Barozzi smiled at his own imagery.

‘I understand.’

‘We have put you on a course of powerful antibiotics. These will attack the infection in your lung but you will feel tired for some time. Your heart is weak and the strain of fighting this infection will take it out of you.’

Underwood was floating away. He could feel exhaustion crawling through his veins like water through tissue paper.

‘I will be back to see you tomorrow.’ Barozzi reattached the chart board to the foot of Underwood’s bed. ‘I’ve left some papers by the side of your bed in case you feel like reading.’

Underwood drifted off to sleep for a couple of minutes. He dreamed of his parents; less distant now than when they were alive. 28 September 1988 and 3 March 1989. Gone within six months of each other. He woke suddenly. Would he have killed Paul Heyer? Would he have kicked him over the cliff edge and watched him smash onto the rocks below?

The killer of Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury was giggling at him, pulling the strings in the back of his head.

He opened his eyes and looked over at the bedside cabinet. There was a small pile of newspapers: The
Independent,
the
Daily
Mail
and the
New
Bolden
Echo.
Underwood reached over for the local newspaper. It was a week old. Lucy Harrington’s smiling face looked back at him from the front page: ‘Local Girl Strikes Gold’ boomed the headline happily.

The
killer
was
local,
thought Underwood.
He
read
this
story.
It
surprised
him
and
occasioned
his
actions.
Why?
The
name.
The
killer
liked
John
Donne.
Lucy
Harrington
was
a
member
of
Donne’s
coterie.
He
saw
the
name
and
got
the
idea.
Why
now,
though?
Underwood remembered that serial killers built and adapted their fantasies over time.
Lucy
Harrington
didn’t
give
the
murderer
his
idea.
She
occasioned
it.
Something
about
the
story
occasioned
his
fantasy.
Occasioned
his
need
to
educate
and
explain.