A Demon in My View (8 page)

It was three weeks since he had been here, and being here at last after so much dread and anguish brought him a more than usually voluptuous pleasure. Even more than usual, it was nearly as good as the real thing, as Maureen Cowan and Bridget O’Neill. So he walked slowly between the jumbled metal rubbish, the stacks of wood and newspapers, his torch making a quivering light which snaked ahead of him. And there, in the third room, she was waiting.

His reactions to her varied according to his mood and his tensions. Sometimes she was no more than the instrument of his therapy, a quick assuagement. But there were times, and this was one of them, when strain and memory had so oppressed him and anticipation been so urgent that the whole scene and she in
it were altered and aggrandised by enormous fantasy. So it was now. This was no cellar in Trinity Road but the deserted, seldom-frequented yard between a warehouse, say, and a cemetery wall; she no life-size doll but a real woman waiting perhaps for her lover. The light of his torch fell on her. It lit her blank eyes, then, deflecting, allowed shadows to play like fear on her face. He stood still, but he could have sworn she moved. There was no sanctuary for her, no escape, nothing but the brick wall rising behind her to a cracked cobweb-hung sky. His torch became a street lamp, shining palely now from a corner. On an impulse he put it out. Absolute silence, absolute darkness. She was trying to get away from him. She must be, for as he felt his way towards the wall he couldn’t find her.

He touched the damp brickwork, and a trickle of water fell between his fingers. He moved them along the wall, feeling for her, grunting now, making strong gruff exhalations. Then his hand touched her dress, moved up to her cold neck. But it felt warm to him and soft, like Bridget O’Neill’s. Was it he or she who gave that choking stifled cry? This time he used his tie to strangle her, twisting it until his hands were sore.

   It took Arthur rather a long time to recover—about ten minutes, which was much longer than usual. But the deed had been more exciting and more satisfying than usual, so that was only to be expected. He restored her to her position against the wall, picked up the torch and made his way back to the cellar door. Cautiously he opened it. The window of Room 2 was still dark. Good. Excellent.

He stepped out into the yard, turned to close the door behind him. As he did so the whole court was suddenly flooded with light. And this light was as terrifying to him as the beam of a policeman’s torch is to a burglar. He wanted to wheel round, but he forced himself to turn slowly, expecting to meet the eyes of Anthony Johnson.

At first he saw only the interior of Room 2, the pale green flecked walls, the gateleg table propped by and piled with books, the primrose washbasin and that light glowing inside the pink
and green polythene shade which, for some reason, was swinging like a pendulum. Then Anthony Johnson appeared under the swinging lamp, crossing the room; now, at last, staring straight back at him. Arthur didn’t wait. He hastened across the court, his head bent, a burning flush mounting across his head and neck. He scuttled through the passage, let himself into the house and went swiftly upstairs.

There, in his own flat, he sat down heavily. Vesta Kotowsky had come up in his absence and pushed her rent under his door, but he was so upset he let the envelope lie there on the doormat. His hands were trembling. Anthony Johnson had returned within less than half an hour of going out. It almost looked as if the whole exercise had been a plot to catch Arthur. But how could he know? He would know now or know something. Probably he was looking for some way of getting back at him for opening that letter. On the face of it, that letter hadn’t seemed very private, not like the ones postmarked Bristol would be, but you never could tell. It might be that this college of his had some sort of rule about students not taking jobs—Arthur admitted to himself that he knew very little about these things—and that he would be expelled or sent down or whatever they called it for attempting to do so. After all, what else could explain Anthony Johnson’s enraged rejection of his note, his deliberate shunning of him, his sneaking out like that followed by his purposeful illumination of the courtyard just as Arthur was emerging from the cellar?

The euphoria he felt after one of his killings totally ruined, Arthur passed a bad night. He sweated profusely so that he fancied the pink sheets smelt bad, and he stripped them off in a frenzy of disgust. Li-li had put her rent envelope under his door at some time in the small hours. By half-past nine he had assembled hers, the two envelopes of the Kotowskys—Vesta insisted on paying her half-share separately from that of her husband—and his own, and was seated downstairs waiting for Stanley Caspian. No more rent from Jonathan Dean, who would be leaving today, thank God, and none to collect (thank God again) from Anthony Johnson, who had paid two months in advance.

The hall was cold and damp. It was a foggy morning, an early harbinger of the winter to come. Stanley stumped in at ten past
ten, wearing a checked windcheater that looked as if it was made from a car rug, and carrying a huge cellophane bag containing cheese puff cocktail snacks. Arthur began to feel queasy because the cheese puffs, orangey-brown, fat, and curvy, reminded him of overfed maggots.

Stanley split the bag open before he had even sat down, and some of the cheese larvae spilt out onto the desk.

“Put the kettle on, me old Arthur. Have a ‘Wiggly-Woggly’?”

“No thank you,” said Arthur quietly. He cleared his throat. “I was down in the cellar last night.” Forcing the carefully planned lie out with all the casualness he could muster, he said, “Looking for a screwdriver, as a matter of fact. The wires had come out of one of my little electric plugs.”

Stanley looked at him truculently. “You’re always grumbling these days, Arthur. First it was the dustbin, now it’s the electricity. I suppose that’s your way of saying I ought to have the place rewired.”

“Not at all. I was simply explaining how I happened to be in the cellar. In case—well, in case anyone might think I was snooping.”

Stanley picked cheese puff crumbs off the bulge of his belly whose ridges seemed as if they had been artfully designed to catch everything their possessor spilt. “I couldn’t care less if you go down the cellar, me old Arthur. Have yourself a ball. Ask some girls round. If you like spending your evenings in cellars, that’s your business. Right?”

Somehow, though he had intended wit, Stanley had got very near the truth. Arthur blushed. He was almost trembling. It was all he could do to control himself while Stanley filled in his rent book, banging in the full stops until it looked as if he would break his pen. Arthur put it back in its envelope himself and, muttering his usual excuse about Saturday being a busy day, made for the stairs. Half-way up them, he heard Anthony Johnson come out of Room 2 and use to Stanley—in mockery? He must have been listening behind the door—his own words of a few moments before:

“I was down in your cellar last night.”

Winter’s being out of stock of all but forty-watt light bulbs, Anthony had been obliged to go as far as the open-till-midnight supermarket at the northern end of Kenbourne Lane. This unsettled him for work, and when he saw Arthur Johnson coming out of the cellar its possibilities intrigued him. He had penetrated no further than the first room, but that was enough.

Stanley Caspian burst into gales of laughter. “I suppose you were looking for a screw?”

Anthony shrugged. Bawdy talk from a man of Caspian’s age and girth disgusted him. “You’ve got a lot of wood and cardboard and stuff down there,” he said. “If you don’t want it, can I have it? It’s for a Guy Fawkes bonfire.”

“Help yourself,” said Stanley Caspian. “Everyone’s got very interested in my cellar all of a sudden, I must say. You weren’t planning to have this here bonfire on my premises, I hope?”

Anthony said no thanks, it wasn’t suitable, which didn’t seem the reply to gratify Caspian, and left him to his rents. He walked over to the station where the little boys were once more at their post, and with them this time a black child. The white children knew him by now. Instead of asking for money, they said hallo.

“Why don’t we have a bonfire on that bit of waste ground?” But even as he spoke he checked himself. Wasn’t that the insinuating approach a child molester would use? “If you like the idea,” he said quickly, “we’ll go and talk to your parents about it.”

Leroy, the coloured boy, lived with his mother in a ground-floor flat in Brasenose Avenue. Linthea Carville turned out to be
a part-time social worker, which gave her an immediate affinity with Anthony, though he would in any case have been drawn to her. He couldn’t help staring at her, this tall daughter of African gods, with her pearly-bloomed dark face, and her black hair, oiled and satiny, worn in a heavy knot on the crown of her head. But he remembered his plan, explained it, and within ten minutes they had been joined by white neighbours, the chairman of the Brasenose Tenants’ Association, and by the mother of Leroy’s taller friend, Steve.

The chairman was enthusiastic about Anthony’s idea. For months his association had been campaigning for the council to convert the waste ground into a children’s playground. This would be a feather in its cap. They could have a big party on November 5 and maybe invite a council representative to be present. Linthea said she would make hot dogs and enlist the help of another friend, the mother of David, the third boy. And when Anthony told them about the wood, Steve said his elder brother had a box barrow which he could bring over to 142 on the following Saturday.

Then they discussed the guy Steve’s mother said she would dress in a discarded suit of her husband’s. Linthea made lots of strong, delicious coffee, and it was nearly lunchtime before Anthony went back to Trinity Road. He had forgotten that this was the day of Jonathan Dean’s departure. The move, he now saw, was well under way. Jonathan and Brian were carrying crates down the stairs and packing them into Brian’s rather inadequate car. Vesta was nowhere to be seen.

“I’ll give you a hand,” Anthony said, and regretted the offer when Brian slapped him on the back and remarked that after Jonathan had deserted him he would know where to turn for a pal.

Jonathan, like Anthony, possessed no furniture of his own but he had hundreds of records and quite a few books, the heaviest and most thumbed of which was the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. While they worked and ate the fish and chips Brian had been sent out to buy, the record player remained on, and the laughter sequence from Strauss’s
Elektra
roared out so maniacally that Anthony expected Arthur Johnson to appear at any moment and complain. But he didn’t appear even when Jonathan
dropped a crate of groceries on the stairs and collapsed in fits of mirth at the sight of egg yolk and H.P. Sauce and extended-life milk dripping from the treads.

They had to make several journeys. Jonathan’s new home was a much smaller room than the one he had occupied at 142, in a squalid, run-down house in the worst part of South Kenbourne. And this alternative to Trinity Road seemed to perplex Brian as much as it did Anthony. What had possessed Jonathan? he kept asking. Why not change his mind even at this late stage? Caspian would surely let him keep his old room if he asked.

“No, he wouldn’t,” said Jonathan. “He’s let it to some Spade.” And he added, like Cicero but less appositely, “O
temporal O mores!”

The record player was the last thing to be shifted. A container was needed in which to transport it, so Brian and Anthony went down to Anthony’s room where Anthony said he had found a cardboard box in the wardrobe. The books impressed Brian and soon he had found out all about Anthony’s thesis, taking up much the same attitude to it as he would have done had he learned Anthony was writing a thriller.

“There’s a study for you,” he said as they drove past the cemetery. “You could use that in your writing. Twenty-five years ago last month that’s where the Kenbourne Killer strangled his first victim. Maureen Cowan, she was called.”

“What, in the cemetery?”

“No, in the path that runs along the back of it. A lot of people use that path as a short cut from the Hospital Arms to Elm Green station. She was a tart, soliciting down there. Mind you, I was only a kid at the time, but I remember it all right.”

“Kid?” said Jonathan. “You mean you’re
kidding
. You were thirteen.”

Brian looked hurt but he made no response. “They never caught the chap. He struck again”—he employed the journalese quite unconsciously as if it were standard usage—“five years later. That time it was a student nurse called Bridget Something. Irish girl. He strangled her on a bit of open ground between the hospital and the railway bridge. Now would he be a psychopath, Tony?”

“I suppose so. Was it the same man both times?”

“The cops thought so. But there were never any more murders—not unsolved ones, I mean. Now why, Tony, would you say that was?”

“Moved out of the district,” said Anthony, who was getting bored. “Or died,” he added, for he had been less than a year old when that first murder was committed.

“Could have been in prison for something else,” said Brian. “Could have been in a mental home. I’ve often wondered about that and whether he’ll ever come back and strike again.” He parked the car outside Jonathan’s new home. “What a dump! You could still change your mind, Jon old man. Move in with Vesta and me for a bit. Have our couch.”

“Christ,” said Jonathan. “There’s one born every minute.” He delivered this platitude as if it were a quotation, as perhaps, Anthony thought, it was.

They invited him to accompany them to the Grand Duke for an evening’s drinking, but Anthony refused. It was nearly five. He went home and read J. G. Miller’s doctoral dissertation: “Eyeblink Conditioning of Primary and Neurotic Psychopaths,” remembering at ten to put his clock and his watch back. It was the end of British Summertime.

   Watching from his eyrie, his living-room window, Arthur saw the new tenant of Room 3 arrive on Sunday afternoon. At first he thought this must be some visitor, a disreputable friend perhaps of Li-li’s or Anthony Johnson’s, for he couldn’t recollect any previous tenant having arrived in such style. The man was as black as the taxi from which he alighted, and not only black of skin and hair. He wore a black leather coat which, even from that distance, Arthur could see had cost a lot of money, and he carried two huge black leather suitcases. To Arthur’s horrified eyes, he resembled some Haitian gangster-cum-political bigwig. He had seen such characters on television and he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that a couple of revolvers and a knife were concealed under that flashy coat.