The Yeare's Midnight (42 page)

Dexter saw the two bloodied eyes staring back at her and thought she might be sick. Lucy Harrington and Elizabeth Drury glared angrily at her.

‘What do you suppose, Alison Dexter?’ asked Crowan Frayne. ‘Is she not beautiful?’

‘Who? All I can see is a bloody mess that you created.’

‘You’re closer to the truth than you realize, Alison. As I said, you have the ability to make strange connections. Sometimes you do it in ignorance of yourself. Donne would regard you as a wit. Remember that beauty is born of ugliness. Worthiness is born of failure.’

‘We learn from our mistakes?’ Dexter snarled at him. ‘Is that
the best you can do? That doesn’t strike me as especially witty. More like a big bloody cliché.’ She stopped herself from saying anything else: there was still one empty space in the eye box.

‘I was born of an ugliness, Sergeant Dexter. Unwanted and unloved, an accident that killed my mother as surely as if she’d walked under a bus. I was born in death. Infused with its ugliness at a subatomic level. But my grandmother created beautiful structures in my soul. She was an alchemist where Dr Stussman is an electrician. She refracted darkness and made it light, catalysed music from white noise, drew poetry from the billion dead voices shouting in my head.’

‘What has that got to do with us?’ Dexter shouted at him. She had a sense that events were beginning to accelerate. A reckoning was approaching.

‘Everything. You see, she hid her ugliness, the darkness of her times and her life. She kept her pain in a wooden box in her bedroom. I found it. The tiny universe of pain and experience she had compressed into this box, into three glass eyes. How fragile and corruptible beauty is. I exposed her horror to the world. It overwhelmed her. I took her placid beauty and made her abhorrent to herself. She saw herself in my eyes and finally knew her own ugliness.’

Stussman moaned in pain, her face a curtain of blood. Dexter had almost worked her hands free. Now she just needed an opportunity. Frayne moved to the foot of the stairs and rolled the oil drum to the centre of the room.

‘So I resolved to become the alchemist, Sergeant Dexter. I decided to take the ugliness I had created, the base matter if you like, and restore it to beauty.’

‘You’re replacing her eyes?’ Dexter asked, playing for time.

‘I am creating poetry, Alison. I am reaching beyond physics and religion, plugging the gaps in the glistening spider’s web that is man’s self-knowledge. Let’s get Dr Stussman here to help us now she’s had a rest.’ Frayne peeled the tape from Stussman’s mouth. She groaned in agony.

‘Doctor, what are the basic characteristics of a metaphysical poem? If you fail to answer I will have to molest Sergeant Dexter’s eyes.’

Stussman tried to look beyond the pain, to concentrate the agony away. ‘Intellectual rigour, sexual or religious imagery, conceit … performance.’ It was all she could manage. Stussman’s head fell forward and dark spots of blood dropped onto the wooden table.

‘You might say, Sergeant Dexter, that the last week has been my own valediction. You must admit it has approached poetry. The rigorous transubstantiation of ugliness into beauty: the bold and bloody imagery, oceans of tears drawn from sightless eyes. Wasn’t my conceit confusing to you at first? Have you not gained knowledge and understanding as it unfolded through Harrington and Drury? Has my performance not entertained and engaged the chosen audience? Has it not dazzled you all with wit and invention? The generation of beauty out of baseness. Violet Frayne’s beauty reborn from the same blood and destruction that once took it from her. It’s alchemy, Alison. It’s the very essence of man’s struggle out of ignorance.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’ Dexter asked. ‘How does your poem end? I suppose you’ll cut my eye out and bash my head in. That doesn’t strike me as poetry, though. That strikes me as exactly the kind of pig ignorance you say man has been struggling to crawl away from.’

‘Why do you think I contacted Dr Stussman? Why did you think I chose women with such specific names? I meant you all to understand, Alison. I took it upon myself to educate. To educate myself and my coterie. To make you worthy. Do you read the Bible, Alison?’

‘No.’

‘The Book of Daniel interested Donne. The writing on the wall at the murder sites? Does that not seem reminiscent of the writing on the wall at the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar prophesying the fall of Israel?’

‘No. To me it is reminiscent of a maniac with a big fucking ego.’

Frayne smiled and turned to Stussman. ‘I’m sure the piteous Dr Stussman is familiar with the Book of Daniel. Tell me, doctor –’ Frayne shook Stussman violently until her eyes rolled
open and her stare fixed on him ‘– are we not as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?’

Dexter started. She remembered her first encounter with Frayne: ‘bedtogoto bedtogo’.
Abednego.
She hadn’t dreamed it.

‘What?’ said Stussman, blinking through the blood that was starting to dry in crusts around her eyes.

‘Are we not worthy now? Have I not made us worthy? I have achieved alchemy, you have found pity and Alison has her mind full of strange connections. Together we are the essence of metaphysics.’ Frayne unscrewed the top of the oil drum, ‘Kind pitty chokes my spleene; brave scorn forbids/Those teares to issue which swell my eyelids.’

Stussman heard the words rise above her pain. The opening couplet of ‘Satyre of Religion’. What did they mean? What was he thinking? She tried to think of his loss, his madness, to put herself in the centre of the inferno that raged inside Crowan Frayne’s mind.
Shadrach,
Meshach
and
Abednego.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Stussman croaked at Dexter across the table.

‘I’m working on it.’ Dexter had one hand free now.

‘We’re all going to die.’

‘Not if I can help it.’

‘Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Donne called them the children in the oven in his “Satyre of Religion”. He used them as imagery.’

‘What oven? What are you talking about?’ Dexter was getting annoyed.

‘In the Book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are cast into a burning furnace to test their faith in God. God saved their lives because of their faith and worthiness.’ Stussman’s wounds were starting to dry and they cracked painfully as she spoke. ‘He sees us as the most worthy.’

Dexter watched in horror as Crowan Frayne tipped the oil drum over and spilled petrol over the floor. He lifted the container and poured the remainder over the book piles, over the table and finally over himself. He then returned to his seat and pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket. He placed it on the table and took two vicious-looking skin clamps from his box
of medical equipment. With her left hand, Dexter frantically picked at the tape that bound her right wrist to the wooden chair. She needed more time.
Must
talk
to
him.

‘So now what?’ she asked. ‘Burning the house down isn’t poetry.’ The smell of petrol was everywhere. The room was as dangerous as a powder keg. It smelled of death.

‘The conceit has almost unfolded, Sergeant Dexter. This process has been educative for us all. You have become a worthy audience and I have become a worthy poet. Are we not poised to become angels?’ With that, Crowan Frayne placed the two eye clamps on the skin above his left eyebrow. Then he ignited his lighter and threw it into the nearest book stack, which promptly burst into flames. The wall of heat hit Dexter in a second. She only had moments to get out before the whole room exploded into flames. Crowan Frayne let out a high-pitched scream as he drove his scalpel into the ciliary muscles at the side of his left eye.

Dexter was panicking. The glue on the tape was melting onto her hands, burning at her skin. A final wrench and both her hands were free. The staircase was on fire now and Dexter was gasping for air. She tore at the tape around her ankles. Flames were spreading quickly up the wall. They rolled across the floor in a blue and yellow tide, eating at the legs of the table. Crowan Frayne dropped his scalpel onto the table and pulled a pair of metal forceps from his equipment tray. Dexter tried not to watch as he forced the claws of the instrument into his eye socket and begin to pull on it.

Finally she was free. She ran around the table to Stussman and desperately tore at the lecturer’s bindings. Fire burned at her feet and her ankles, melting her tights against her skin. Crowan Frayne screamed again as fire washed over his chest and back. With a final terrible effort, he pulled his left eye from its socket and dropped it on the table in a dark pool of blood.

‘Is this not the triumph of the will, Sergeant Dexter?’ he screamed.

The fire was roaring now. She had to get to the staircase fast. Dexter quickly reached across the table, grabbed a scalpel from Frayne’s box and slashed violently at the tape around Stussman’s
ankles. It finally came away and Dexter dragged Stussman to the foot of the stairs.

‘Look, Alison!’ Crowan Frayne shouted through the flames. ‘Love has wrought new alchemy. I have forged beauty from ugliness. She is beautiful again.’ As flames engulfed him, Crowan Frayne held up the highly polished purple-lined box that now contained three eyes.

Dexter hauled Stussman up the burning staircase with her last vestiges of strength. At the top she turned the door handle and pushed hard against the wooden door. It was locked. For the first time that night, Alison Dexter screamed for help.

Jensen heard the screams and smelled the smoke rising from the house. There was a large stone urn in the front garden. She grabbed it, groaning under its weight, and smashed it through Violet Frayne’s living-room window. The broken glass tore at her skin as she climbed through. Three squad cars pulled up in the street outside.

‘Sergeant Dexter?’ She shouted into the smoke. ‘Dr Stussman?’ She heard a muffled scream in response.

Jensen hurried into the hallway and opened the front door. She saw Harrison running across the road and turned back inside, staggering blindly through the smoke in the direction of he cries. She found the door to the basement in a few seconds. The handle was red hot. The door was locked. She looked desperately around for a key. Harrison had joined her.

‘We’re going to have to force it,’ she shouted.

‘All right. On three.’

‘Stand back inside.’

They charged at the door together and it fell open, hanging inwards as the rotting frame gave way. The wall of smoke and heat hit them immediately. Jensen crouched, coughing, and reached blindly into the smoke. After a second she felt a body.

Two
months
later
…

Paul Heyer’s BMW purred to a halt outside the house. The spring sun was bright and hard. He could still see the moon, slowly receding from the morning sky. The light hurt his eyes. He flipped down the car’s sun visor and turned to Julia.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ he asked.

‘I’m sure.’

‘I don’t like leaving you alone with him.’

‘It’ll be all right. He’s had a heart attack, Paul. I don’t think he’s up to a fight.’

Heyer shook his head. He still bore the scars.

‘You’ve got your mobile phone?’

‘In my coat pocket.’ Julia tapped against the soft material of her new jacket.

‘If he tries anything – or if he looks like he’s losing it – just press your speed-dial button for my mobile. You won’t have to talk to me. I’ll come running as soon as I see you calling.’

‘I’ll be fine.’ She hesitated for a second. ‘You’ll be right here, though?’

‘At the end of the road.’

Julia clicked open the car door and stepped outside. The house looked scruffy and exhausted, the garden overgrown. She took a deep, cold breath and walked up the garden path as Paul gently pulled away behind her. She pressed the doorbell. It didn’t ring. She knocked at the door. It opened almost immediately.

John Underwood wore a jacket and tie. He was clean-shaven and had a smudge of toothpaste on his tie. He smiled at Julia and gestured at her to come inside. The house had recently been hoovered. Julia could smell furniture polish.

‘You’ve tidied up,’ she said as they entered the living room.

‘Just starting to,’ he said. ‘I’ve been back a week.’

‘The garden …’

‘Is next on the list.’

Julia sat down in what had been her favourite armchair. She looked strangely beautiful in the sunlight. It glowed on the side of her face. Underwood remembered her standing by the bonfire twenty-something years ago. He squashed the thought as it dug at him.

‘Tea?’ he asked.

‘No, thanks. How are you feeling now?’

‘Better. Back up to seventy-five per cent, I’d say.’

‘Have they given you drugs for your heart?’

‘Oh yes.’ Underwood waved vaguely at a row of pill bottles on the sideboard. ‘Two of the green ones with breakfast and dinner – they’re for my heart. One yellow and one blue one every morning for my chest. They seem to be working, although my water’s gone a funny colour.’ He risked a smile.

Julia looked at him closely. ‘And you, John, how are you feeling in yourself?’

He paused for a second. Should he tell her about the nightmares, about the panics and depressions that rolled through him like storm systems over the North Sea? What was the point? He was too tired to try and score points. The endgame was over. He had lost. ‘I see Jack Harvey once a week,’ he said simply. ‘Do you remember him? He’s the police psychologist in Huntingdon.’

‘Vaguely.’ She didn’t.

‘The disciplinary committee insisted I see him. They like to keep embarrassing episodes like this in-house. I …’ He fumbled for the right words, ‘I want to thank you and Paul for not pressing any charges. It helped. It helped a lot.’ It hurt him to say that. He felt the rage rise slightly in his throat but this time it passed quickly; blown like smoke into the wind.

‘It was Paul’s decision,’ she said abruptly.

Underwood smiled. He knew it must have been a bit more complicated than that.

‘Thanks, anyway.’

‘Will you go back?’

‘That depends, really.’ Underwood’s eyes tracked a sparrow as it darted past the window. ‘I am suspended for six months. Well, they’ve called it sick leave. In June I will have a full psychiatric evaluation and on the basis of that they’ll decide whether I can go back. I doubt CID will have me. Maybe they’ll put me on the cones hotline.’

Julia smiled faintly. John was in there somewhere. Underneath the crumpled, tired face and the sunken, haunted eyes, there was a spark of someone she recognized.

‘John. We might as well get this over with.’ She opened her handbag and withdrew a piece of paper. She handed it to him. ‘This is the name and address of my solicitor. He’ll be sending you a letter next week about the house, the mortgage and so on. It’s really just paperwork now – making sure everything gets agreed, signed and exchanged.’

‘I understand.’

‘Have you looked at any other houses?’ She floated the question tentatively; uncertain of how he would respond.

‘I’ve been looking at some flats advertised in the newspaper. Prices have gone mad here since they built the high-speed link to London.’ He tried to mask his concern. It was going to be a tough ride over the next few months.

‘I’m sorry, John, I really am. But it has to be for the best.’

‘That’s what I keep telling myself.’ His eyes had misted over slightly. ‘It’s got to hurt to work, right?’

Julia nodded. She was upset but she wouldn’t cry. She had cried enough.

‘Sometimes we have to change to move on,’ she said. ‘I suppose I should go really. Paul’s waiting outside.’

Underwood’s brow furrowed slightly. He still hadn’t reconciled himself to Paul Heyer.
‘Alas
my
love
you
do
me
wrong,’
the voice in his head sung sadly, ‘
to
cast
me
off
discourteously.’
He suddenly realized that the tune no longer infuriated him. The voice wasn’t his.

‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘we can’t keep him waiting.’

He walked her to the front door. For the first time he noticed her hair. It was shorter, tidier than he remembered. It suited her. She opened the door and turned towards him.

‘I suppose this is it, then,’ she said.

‘I suppose it is.’

Julia leaned forward and kissed John Underwood on the cheek for the last time. He closed his eyes for a second, drowning in memories. Then he remembered.

‘Oh, I’ve got something for you.’ He coughed away the tears and hurried back into the house, returning with a book in a small paper bag. He handed it to her. ‘I thought you might enjoy these. Don’t open it now.’

‘John. I …’

‘Just take it, please. I …’ He paused. ‘It would mean a lot to me.’

Julia Underwood took the book and walked out of the life that had become a torture. She didn’t look back, not even when the door closed behind her. Paul drove up and parked just out of sight of the house.

‘How was it?’ he asked as she climbed in.

‘Fine,’ Julia replied. ‘He seems a bit better.’

‘I’ve been looking at some of the houses in the street. It’s a nice area. You might get a quarter of a million for the old place if he tidies it up a bit.’

Julia looked at Paul coldly but said nothing. For the first time, she felt a shiver of doubt and trepidation. They drove to a service station and Paul jumped out to fill the car with petrol. While he was away, Julia strolled to the edge of the forecourt, opened the bag and took out the book. It was a book of poetry:
John
Donne’s
Songs
and
Sonnets.
There was a bookmark at one of the centre pages. She opened the book and read:

Julia didn’t make it to the second verse. She closed the book and walked hurriedly towards the open door of Heyer’s BMW.

Heather Stussman lay in only mild discomfort in Ward C5 at New Bolden Infirmary. She hated hospitals: the smell, the noise, the invasiveness. ‘Hell is other people,’ Jean-Paul Sartre had once written. She now knew exactly what he had meant.

It had been a painful eight weeks. Eight weeks of bandages and embrocation. The burns on her legs were the worst. The fire had seared through her trousers as Dexter had frantically tried to cut her free from the hell that was Crowan Frayne’s basement. The scars on her forehead were horrendous but improving. She had only looked ‘Pity’ in the eye once. It would take time and the agony of skin grafts before she could face the pity of other people.

‘Have you spoken to John Underwood?’ asked Stussman.

‘Not for a few weeks. He’s got other things on his mind,’ Alison Dexter said flatly, trying to conceal her guilt. ‘He’s not well.’

‘You should go see him.’

‘Maybe. I owe him a call.’

‘Are you feeling better?’

Dexter shrugged. ‘It takes time, right?’

‘Nightmares?’

‘A few,’ Dexter said tightly.

‘It’s hardly surprising.’

‘They’re less frequent since they put Mr Frayne in the ground.’ Dexter hesitated. ‘Well, what was left of him.’

‘Not much, I imagine.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

There was a brief silence. Both women knew how close they had come to joining their tormentor. Dexter felt uncomfortable and coughed the moment away. Stussman watched her closely.

‘You know, Alison, we got off on the wrong foot …’

‘Forget it,’ Dexter replied without emotion.

‘I was cold towards you.’

‘I’m used to it.’

‘So am I. That’s why I should have known better.’

‘It’s ancient history.’ Dexter’s hard green eyes watched the food trolley rattle past. The nurse had bobbed red hair. She was pretty. Dexter looked away.

‘I’ve had a lot of time to think while I’ve been lying here,’ said Stussman.

‘Thinking’s dangerous.’

Stussman didn’t smile. It hurt to smile.

‘People like you and me …’ she said carefully, pausing to find the right words. Dexter shifted in her seat. She sensed where this was going. ‘We have no reason to be dismissive of each other. There’s no logic to it. In different ways we are fighting for the same thing.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Respect.’

‘Go on.’

‘We’re driven by common elements. The characteristics that we value most in ourselves we often find repellent in others.’

Dexter nodded, suddenly ashamed of herself. ‘You look tired. I should go.’

‘Do you think about it much?’ asked Stussman abruptly.

‘I try not to, but yes, thinking about it is unavoidable. It’s necessary, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’ Stussman’s head was stinging again and she adjusted her bandage as it became uncomfortable. ‘You know, in
The
Divine
Comedy,
after Dante leaves Hell he arrives in Purgatory. An angel writes “P” on his forehead seven times. It stands for “Peccatum,” which is Latin for sin.’

‘Seven deadly sins, right?’

‘Right. As Dante repents his sins each “P” is removed from his forehead until he can enter Paradise.’ Stussman’s gaze explored the clear sky beyond the grimy hospital glass. ‘I guess I have a way to go yet.’

‘It’s funny. The thing that bothers me now …’ Dexter paused, then went on. ‘Now it’s over and I’ve had time to think it through – why did he burn all those books? I would have thought that he loved books.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that, too,’ Stussman said. ‘He talked a lot about every dead thing living inside him … about how he could hear the dead speaking to him. Maybe he thought the dead spoke to him through the books, too. Books are just thoughts on paper. Perhaps he thought that by burning the books he was performing some kind of fucked-up alchemy on them. You know: the ideas in the books become flame and smoke, he becomes flame and smoke, you and I become flame and smoke. We all become one big beautiful bonfire of ideas.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Donne wrote in “Air and Angels” that angels assume a physical reality, just as air condenses into clouds or fog.’

‘He talked about
us
becoming angels.’

‘“Then as an Angell, face and wings/Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth weare/So thy love may be my loves sphere.”’ Stussman smiled faintly at Dexter. ‘Perhaps he thought we were worthy of becoming angels with him; with faces and wings of smoke. A smoky ecstasy of angels and ideas, worthiness and knowledge.’

‘Doesn’t sound so bad when you put it like that. It’s a less attractive idea when your arse is catching fire in a basement, though.’

Stussman let out a tired sigh. ‘The metaphysical poets tried to fill the gaps between recognized science, religion and logic. The Renaissance was a time of great uncertainties and intellectual conflict. Donne and his colleagues took these uncertainties and inconsistencies and catalysed them into a new mode of expression.’

‘Strange connections,’ said Dexter quietly.

‘Absolutely. Let’s take the case in point. Newton’s law of matter says that nothing is ever destroyed, it merely changes form. It’s not too much of an intellectual leap to say that ideas and memories don’t die, either. Maybe Mr Frayne thought that the fire would turn the knowledge buried in the books, the ideas and abilities that you and I have, and his own intelligence into something unitary, beautiful and complex.’

‘That’s mad.’

‘Alison, the Catholic Church believes that a wafer and a glass of wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ
during Mass. There’s not a huge difference in the two positions. At least Frayne’s position is based on logic.’

‘You’ll burn in Hell, saying things like that.’

‘I doubt it. Let me ask you something now. Underwood said that these killers have a fantasy life that they live out through their killings.’

‘Some do. I guess our man Frayne fell into that category. They’re called Visionary Motivated Killers. They dream, they plan, they develop a fantasy that they gradually escalate and refine until they are compelled to act it out.’