Cold Hands (22 page)

On a bench across from the
Advertiser
’s downtown offices you ate your sandwiches and read your book and did this day after day, until, after a week, you saw the man from the photograph coming out of the building talking to an attractive, well-dressed woman who looked a little older than he did. They stood talking in the sunshine by a cherry tree. You crossed the square and passed close enough to hear their voices. It was unmistakable; his accent had clearly undergone some work, some revision, but it was still there, clear and distinct, that Ayrshire burr.

You settled into a routine familiar to you from your Glasgow days with kindly Mr Cardew.

Watching. Waiting. Thinking.

Your disbelief when you saw where, and how, he lived. The enormous house of glass and timber, with its pool and outbuildings, its 4x4s in the drive and solar panels on the
roof. The trips to what you soon learned was his in-laws mansion. And then the joy, the utter joy, when you saw the boy, the son, skipping along the deck in the summer sun. (You were parked on a ridge half a mile away, with powerful binoculars and a map spread out on the roof in case of questions from passers-by.)

Because you had been wondering what to do. Had he been single, had there been nothing to take from him, it was very likely you would simply have abducted him, tortured him for as long as you could keep him alive, and then killed him. Now, when you saw all that he had to lose, a different plan suggested itself.

Take from him everything there was to take.

Make him watch.

Let him live.

Fate had one last favour in store for you. It had been staring you in the face for weeks too, you just hadn’t noticed it until, one day, on one of your frequent drives by the Miller house, you glanced left down the drive that led to the farmhouse perhaps a half-mile from their property, their nearest ‘neighbour’ really, and noticed for the first time the yellow-and-red realtor’s sign.

‘TO LET’.

You drove back into Regina so fast you nearly crashed the car twice. On the drive your backstory formed in your head and you practised your accent. A Southern American – Georgia twang was something you felt very comfortable with. You’d got such compliments on it when you’d done
Streetcar
all those years ago, back at the Arts Centre, in another life, when you were another person. It was an accent you knew you could maintain without serious
slippage for long stretches of conversation. You would practise too.

You were retired. Your husband had recently died. You wanted to paint landscapes – the view was perfect. No, you didn’t mind that the house was a bit run-down, didn’t mind at all. In fact, would they mind if you took a one-year lease with an option to extend and paid the first year’s rental in advance? The realtor nearly fell over running to get the keys to take you for a look around.

You were nearly sick with fear that Saturday morning, the first time you went over there. Would your accent give you away? Was it possible he’d recognise you? Even after nearly thirty years and twenty pounds and a different hair colour? In the end it was the wife who was there to receive your home-made jam. She made coffee and you talked in the vast modern kitchen, with you oohing and ahhing over the house while you gave her a more elaborate version of the story you’d given the realtor. He came home just as you were leaving, trailing the kid behind him.

‘Eye-reen,’ you said, shyly extending your hand. (You’d decided that shyness would be part of your character.)

‘Donnie,’ he lied easily, smiling, taking your hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Irene. This is Walt.’

You looked down and smiled at the angelic little boy grinning up at you, half hiding behind his father’s leg.

You walked home two feet off the ground. You had done it. Now it just required patience and planning.

Two of your strong suits.

SHE STOPPED TALKING
. She seemed dreamy now, sleepy and faraway. ‘Why did you wait so long?’ I asked. I was sitting down now, in an armchair across from her, the gun still trained on her chest.

‘I wanted to watch you for a while, see what you’d become.’

‘What have I become?’

She shrugged. ‘A decent person, I suppose. I don’t really care. It doesn’t change anything.’ She had let her head drop down and was gently massaging her bandaged right temple. ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘what time is it, William?’

I looked at my watch, not taking the gun off her. ‘Nearly three.’

‘We’d best get on then.’

She reached down into her boot and pulled out a knife. My eight-inch Global chef’s knife.

I stood up. ‘If you don’t put that down, I’ll kill you.’

‘Yes, why haven’t you killed me? After what I did to your wife and child?’ She sounded genuinely puzzled.

‘If you –’

She was trying to stand up.

‘PUT THE FUCKING KNIFE DOWN!’

She started getting to her feet. I trained the gun on her head, on the turban of bandages, the black sight on the barrel standing out stark against the white cotton, just five feet away, point-blank. I pulled the trigger.

Click.

She looked at me – her eyes suddenly very clear – and smiled. ‘You think I didn’t sit there every day with my binoculars watching you in your little office?’

Click.

‘Watching you play cowboys with your stupid little gun? Keeping the bullets in one drawer, just in case little Walt stumbled upon it?’

Click.

My legs caving in.

‘Silly boy, William.’

I brought the gun up to smash her in the head as she lunged with terrible speed, smashing into me, knocking me down onto the chair, driving the knife hard into my left thigh twisting it. I howled and tried to hit her with the pistol again but she caught my wrist with surprising strength and kept twisting the knife. I could feel it scraping the bone and I struggled to keep from fainting. I pushed her back and punched her in the face, driving my fist into the sodden latticework of bandages. She screamed now and stumbled backwards, falling onto the floor, letting go of the knife, leaving it sticking in my thigh, twanging, buried four inches deep, halfway up the blade. I could hear Walt yelling from down the hall as I threw myself forward at her but she kicked out, taking my legs from beneath me and I slammed straight down onto the floor, my left leg coming down first, the handle of the –

My scream deafening.

White light as I felt the impact push the blade all the way through my thigh, through bone and muscle, and out the other side. I felt myself losing consciousness. I sensed her above me, picking something up, something heavy from the table, and then I felt air above my skull moving, humming, and then I felt nothing.

I CAME ROUND
on my side on the floor of the games room. I’d been gagged and hog-tied; my hands behind my back, bound tightly to my feet which were folded up into the small of my back. The knife was gone from my thigh and she’d tied a crude tourniquet just above the wound. The leg of my jeans was soaked in blood and the pain was excruciating. The smell of wet leather as her boots stomped past me, carrying her Gladstone bag towards the pool table. I looked up and saw Walt.

He was lashed to the table, spreadeagled and crying. His head was turned towards me and I saw that he’d been gagged too, but his eyes were begging, imploring me to help him.

‘Tell me, William.’ Her tone was calm and conversational, ‘How much do you know about torture? I’d say I’m fairly widely read on the subject. It kept me going, all those years ago, when it looked hopeless. Fantasising, you could say. When I was keeping an eye on your Mr Cardew I’d sit in the Mitchell Library and read for hours. About the Chinese, the Russians, medieval methods versus modern ones . . .’

I heard a noise from the Gladstone bag, like something thunking against glass. ‘Sometimes I think it was the only
thing keeping me sane. You should count yourself lucky we have so little time. If only it could have been otherwise.’ She was moving around the table as she talked. Pulling on Walt’s ropes, binding him tighter. ‘It would have provided some great opportunities. Scaphism for instance. Do you know about scaphism?’

She perched on the edge of the pool table, the big knife in her hand, and turned to me, talking on, oblivious to Walt crying and struggling uselessly behind her. ‘It comes from the Greek “
skaphe
”, meaning “scooped out”, but was mainly practised in ancient Persia. What they did, those clever Persians, was they took you to a riverbank in summertime and they lashed you inside a hollowed-out tree trunk, with your head sticking out one end and your feet out the other and they let you float in the shallow water, among the reeds, while they force-fed you for a couple of days. Lord did they feed you. They made you drink so much milk and honey that you developed diarrhoea. You’d be just . . .
filling
that tree trunk up with rivers of nasty filth. They’d rub honey on your face and feet too if they really didn’t like you. And then they’d leave you. Well, not completely. They’d stay to watch and feed you. Great crowds of people sometimes, clapping and cheering as you floated on the stagnant water, under the hot sun. You’d have been fairly roughly beaten up prior to all this of course, your own faeces flowing into your cuts, your mouth, your eyes. Then the insects would come. Flies and mosquitoes. Ants, wasps and beetles and whatnot. Great dragonflies. Horseflies as big as swallows, with huge, stinging tails. They’d sting you and bite you and gorge on your flesh and lay their eggs inside you. They’d keep giving you food and water, the Persians, pouring on
that honey. They didn’t want you dying of dehydration or starvation. They wanted to watch that cloud of insects grow and grow around you: bigger than a car, big as a bus, a whale. Engulfing you as you screamed all day and all night. Screaming as maggots and larvae burst out of your flesh in great clumps, your face a huge, swollen mass of boils, bites and sores. Do you know there are recorded cases of people enduring this for seventeen days before they died of sceptic shock?
Seventeen days.
’ She sighed. ‘Sadly, we don’t have that amount of time. So I’ve come up with a kind of condensed version for young Walt here.’

She moved towards her bag. Please God, no.

‘I think the thing that abhors us most as humans, as top-of-the-chain predators, is the idea of something feeding on us. Burrowing within us.’

She reached into the bag with both hands and hefted out a big glass Mason jar with a metal lid, the kind you see in old-fashioned sweet shops. There were airholes in the lid.

Inside the jar – a fat, black rat.

It was huge, almost completely filling the jar, with a long, wet-looking pink tail coiled around it. She set it down on the edge of the table. The rat was throwing itself at the glass, enraged, confused, its yellow teeth bared horribly. Walt started screaming into his gag, shaking his head from side to side.

‘I’ve been starving him for weeks.’

I felt my mind coming loose. Sanity slipping away.

‘Tell me, William.’ She came over and knelt beside me, taking my gag out.

‘Please,’ I said.

‘What really happened that day? What don’t I know? What
are you leaving out? I’ve had nearly thirty years of guessing. If you’re honest with me, if I believe you, I might be persuaded to put him back in the bag and give Walt a reasonably quick death.’

There was no sound from Walt. He’d fainted.

‘I told you.’ I was crying. ‘It was Banny. He –’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Please . . .’

It was time to go back. Back to the riverbank.

DOCHERTY WENT FOR
Banny.

Instantly, you could tell he’d never been in a fight in his life: head down, fists flailing wildly. Banny, on the other hand, had been fighting since his first day at primary school; an eight-year veteran of playground battles and street fights. He stepped back and let Docherty reach him, taking a couple of weak, useless punches on the arms before he grabbed his hair and started slowly pulling Docherty’s head towards the ground. ‘Iya! Iya!’ Docherty squealed. Banny kicked Docherty hard in the face, one, two, three times. He let him go and Docherty staggered back and fell down, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, but trying to get back up, trying to stand on trembling legs.

‘C’MON THEN!’ Banny screamed.

It became like a dream, like a nightmare, like a video, like one of the horror videos watched on those endless afternoons off school, the curtains closed in the living room of the small council house, the only light coming from the fizzing television. Things happened quickly, fast-forward, and yet seemed to take all the time in the world. Freeze-frame. Slow motion. Banny lashing Docherty with the rod, shouting
things I couldn’t hear. Tommy, his jaw set terribly as his foot lashed back and forth, real blood on the ox-blood Doc Martens. Above us the sky was cloudless, smiling on the crime, the riverbank empty for miles in both directions. The bushes and the poured-concrete weir house bearing silent witness. Docherty’s trousers were pulled off, then his pants, his trembling, bloodied hand as he tried to stop this, tried to hold onto this last shred of dignity (‘no, no, no, please, no . . .’), and then the bronze rod was arcing against the blue again, the sun kissing the length of the graphite as it whistled through the air, a filament of silver line trailing behind it. The red welts appearing on his thighs, his buttocks, the blood. More blood. His face – the face I still see every night as I reach for sleep – caked in dirt and tears, a pebble stuck to his cheek, looking at me, begging. Tommy sitting on his back, Banny on his legs, moving the broken end of the rod towards . . .

His scream.

This had all gone far enough, too far, much, much too far. But there was further to go, distance yet to run, as Tommy jumped on his head now, laughing, stumbling, falling over. Then I was climbing up on the wall above Docherty and Banny was shouting ‘Go oan, Wullie! Dae it!’ and I was leaping off.

Me, caught against the sun.

My black silhouette framed, arms extended, feet coming down, like at the pool (‘No Dive-Bombing’), like an awful bird of prey, falling, falling, my feet the talons, coming straight down at Docherty’s skull, Docherty sobbing, trying to crawl, the glittering rod quivering in time with his sobs. My face, lit with terrible glee. The impact . . .