An Absence of Natural Light (7 page)

‘She didn't value life,' Tom said. ‘She didn't value her own life. She proved that when she took it.'

‘That's not right,' Rebecca said. ‘I'd say she valued her own life very highly. She had sufficient self-regard to think she could defy nature by coming back. Can you tell us about the specifics of her death, Professor?'

‘That's the last thing I can tell you,' he said. ‘It's the only remaining thing about Rachel Gaunt I really think I know.'

She did it with whisky and sleeping pills on the last day of the summer term. She was discovered lying on her back with a serene expression on her fully made-up face wearing the same blue satin dress she'd worn to the summer balls. Side one of
Kind of Blue
was playing on auto-repeat on her Dansette record player at the time her body was discovered. She'd been one of only five student residents at Absalom Court who owned cars and hers was parked in its usual position to the rear of the block with the keys left in the ignition.

‘Could it have been accidental?'

‘No, Tom,' Fleetwood said, ‘I don't think it could.'

‘Whisky and pills can be a confusing combination.'

‘Rachel owned a small black cat,' Fleetwood said. ‘Strictly speaking, students weren't allowed pets in their rooms, but Rachel had a disarming gift for getting away with breaking rules. Somehow she made them seem absurd and petty and you by association absurd and petty if you attempted to enforce them.'

‘And you didn't want her thinking that about you,' Rebecca said.

‘No, I didn't. I was twenty-nine years old by then, older than her by a decade, but despite her amorality she was vivacious and beautiful and my male vanity was still intact. Pathetic as it sounds, I wanted her approval.'

‘And the cat?'

‘Cute little creature, never looked like much more than a kitten, though it caught its share of mice. Some of the other students joked it was her familiar. There were rumours, only half in jest, that she might be a dabbler in the occult. I don't think anyone seriously thought she was capable of witchcraft, though looks-wise she certainly contrived the right, vampy appearance. Anyway, she killed the cat. She laced its food with rat poison. Its last meal, as a consequence. The cat died with its owner.'

Rebecca asked, ‘Did this Jericho Society make waves over their protégée's death?'

‘No, they didn't, not a word, which was curious. But the school was in no way culpable and as I've said already, suicide among students was far more common then than I believe it is today. They expected less of a world that expected more of them. It was a sometimes unhealthy equation.'

Tom and Rebecca exchanged a look and rose to say their goodbyes. Professor Fleetwood looked at Tom and said, ‘I read about your retirement in the
Telegraph
. It saddened me beyond words. Is there no hope, no further surgical procedure you could try?'

‘None,' Tom said.

‘It's such a pity.'

‘Did you play yourself?'

‘Got my blue playing at Cambridge. I captained the Varsity Team. Had pro trials at Hartlepool and Chesterfield and a couple of other places. I wasn't good enough.'

‘I'll bet you grew up playing in a back alley with a bald tennis ball.'

The Professor chuckled. ‘Hour after hour,' he said. ‘Even the dark didn't stop us.'

‘No Xboxes or Game Boys or tablets back then, eh? All the kids who could play, completely two-footed from all the constant practice.'

The Professor grinned, showing his dentures. ‘My left peg wasn't just for standing on, that's for bloody sure.'

‘You'd have been good enough today, Professor. You'd have made the grade in today's game, I'd bet on it.'

Professor Fleetwood seemed to grow inside his old suit. Rebecca saw it happen. She watched Tom take something bright with the number seven sewn onto it from the bag she'd wondered why he'd brought.

‘Rebecca mentioned that you were a fan,' he said. ‘I've signed it for you. It's the shirt I wore for the game that clinched us the title last season.'

‘You scored, twice.' He held out his hands to take the shirt.

‘I got the rub of the green,' Tom said.

‘It was football from another planet. They couldn't get near you,' the Professor said, staring at his prize.

They said their goodbyes and stood for a moment outside on the street, about to part because Rebecca had to go to work. She sniffed.

‘Why are you crying? Don't cry, Rebecca.'

He reached for her and held her in his arms and she said, ‘I'm crying because you're in such an awful situation and you're such a good man who deserves so much better.'

‘I'm not frightened,' he said. ‘I'm not frightened of her at all. And you have to stop crying, if only so you can put an end to my misery by telling me what iconoclastic means.'

She wrestled free of him. ‘Do you know what a doppelgänger is, Tom?'

‘I'm not completely ignorant. It's your double and it's a sign of bad luck to meet one.'

‘Not just a sign of bad luck,' Rebecca said. ‘It's a harbinger of death.'

‘Then maybe you're the one in the awful situation. Maybe you'd be safer staying away from the flat.'

She'd taken a tissue from her pocket and was dabbing at her eyes with it. She said, ‘No. I am frightened and don't mind admitting it. But I'm damned if I'm giving Rachel Gaunt a free run at you.'

‘She isn't coming back for that. If she is coming back, if she's not back already.'

Rebecca nodded in the direction of the building from which they'd just come. ‘Professor Fleetwood was smitten. I suspect all the men she encountered were, regardless of age, gay as well as straight, and some of the women too.'

‘She was seriously bad news,' Tom said.

‘She was beautiful and beguiling bad news, Tom.'

‘Yeah, she was,' he said, ‘pointless to deny it.'

The flat was a fifteen-minute stroll from the care home housing the Professor. It was just after midday and he had his appointment with the LSE archivist at their Bloomsbury building at 3 p.m. Bloomsbury was somewhere he knew from his association with Great Ormond Street Hospital and a part of town he liked. He was curious about the cine film Rebecca had arranged for him to view. It would give him a chance to judge for himself the likeness between the two women the Professor had thought so strong.

He was glad he had taken the shirt along. Unlike the trophies, the shirts – those of his own he'd kept and those he'd swapped with opponents at the end of major games – were in a bin bag where he'd put them, packing in a hurry to exit the tasteless hangar of a house he'd occupied with Melody. He'd been happy about the Professor's apparent joy at receiving the shirt, but was slightly melancholy now thinking about what Fleetwood had said about him playing football from another planet the last time he'd worn it. It was true. No one had been able to get near him that night. It was a rare and wonderful sensation and he knew he'd experienced it for the last time.

He got into the flat and switched on his laptop and thought about the hundreds of emails and texts from friends and former team-mates and his agent and journalists and the fans he'd accumulated, because he'd ignored them since this business began. He wondered, if he just deleted it all, would his life suffer even slightly as a consequence? He suspected not. What had dominated his thoughts and feelings, since meeting her, was Rebecca. Then the display on his laptop clarified and he saw the mouse-torture screensaver image and frowned. It was intrusive. It was somewhere between discovering you'd been squatted and having an itch you couldn't scratch.

He wondered how he would react if she knocked softly on the other side of the basement door now and lured him to her in that husky, seductive voice of hers. Would he be indignant? Or would he just be overwhelmed by lust the way it seemed everyone else had been on coming into contact with Rachel. She'd flick her bobbed hair and lick her lips with a wanton look in her eyes and he'd be fumbling at his flies on raw instinct. Would it even seem like betrayal, given that she and Rebecca, physically, were so close to being one and the same?

Except that they weren't the same. Rebecca had fallen victim to drug addiction and sexual promiscuity for a period. Rachel had never fallen victim to anything except her own wilful desires. Rebecca had been remorseful and ashamed and Rachel had been a brazen stranger to morality.

It was an odd coin if they were the two sides of it. Rebecca was as good as Rachel had been bad. He thought about the doppelgänger, which he remembered was a German thing, like all the best fairytales. For want of books at home, he'd read them greedily in the library at school. Wickedness often prevailed in those stories. He didn't have much doubt, between Rebecca and Rachel, who would prove the stronger if it came down to a struggle.

He looked at his watch. It wasn't the model he endorsed. It was a Bremont Boeing and he'd bought it a couple of days earlier because he got a kick out of wearing a watch made by an English company that said London on the face. He'd liked the look of it in the jewellers' window. It was a very handsome timepiece. Buying himself anything was still a bit of a novelty. It was only just 12.30. He didn't need more than an hour to get to where he needed to be at three. He didn't feel spooked in the flat, not in the daytime, at least. He could hear or feel nothing unusual and there were no phantom odours. He decided that he would go down to the basement, just out of curiosity. It was his property after all.

He couldn't honestly remember whether the hook had always been there or had been put there recently, specifically for the task in which it was currently employed. Hooks weren't noticeable items unless you were actually looking for one. This one was brass and carelessly brushed with the same white emulsion as the wall and might have been there since the building's construction. To Tom, there was no way of telling.

The hanger depending from the hook, though, was definitely a recent addition. It was made of curved sloping shoulders of polished wood screwed to a crossbeam lathed smooth and it looked expensive under its coating of dark varnish and carefully buffed beeswax. The blue dress hung on the hanger didn't look at all as he'd imagined it would when the professor had described Rachel's death scene. He'd mentioned summer balls and so Tom had pictured something floaty and lace-frilled and possibly embellished by ribbons and mother-of-pearl. He should have known she was too stridently sexual for that sort of confection.

The dress was just a satin sheath with a slashed neck and a split up the thigh. It had been cut to hug the curves of the woman who wore it. He lifted the hanger off the hook by its handle and turned the dress around and the fabric danced before his eyes blackly in its slick satin contours and he saw that it buttoned all the way up the back, closely secured, from the neckline to the hem. He whistled. He knew enough about couture clothing from the ever-changing wardrobe he'd bought Melody to know that the dress he held was a designer item that even in the early 1960s must have cost a fortune. He looked at the label and saw that the house that had created it was Schiaparelli.

He gripped the fabric itself and it slithered through his fist, smooth and slick and cool against his skin. He sniffed its shoulder, just above where the cloth was cut and stitched to shape the swell of her breasts and smelled the recently familiar scent of Shalimar perfume. There was, too, just the faintest, liquorice hint of Gauloises tobacco. He noticed a hair, then, caught in the hook and eye that closed the dress invisibly just beneath the nape of her neck. It was shorter than one of Rebecca's and while her hair was a darkish brown, this was raven black.

Martens and Degrue, who were actually the Jericho Society, must have thought very highly of their orphan, Tom thought. He couldn't imagine how they would have reacted to her suicide. For whatever reason, they'd invested a lot in her and it had come to nothing, except, of course, that it seemed to be coming to something now. He put the dress on its hanger back on the hook and looked at his Bremont watch. It told him that the time was just before one.

He was aware of the swell of arousal in his groin. It was heavy and hard with desire. It bulged and throbbed in the confinement of his jeans, slightly hampering his progress climbing the basement steps. He'd take a shower, though he'd had one earlier after his run. He didn't feel contaminated or even sullied by his contact with the dress. He felt he needed a shower, though, as someone might feel the need to cleanse themselves after some intimacy, spontaneous and therefore unprotected, naked with a stranger.

The strangeness of it all was something he was aware of, he thought as he soaped himself down. But it had receded, really, the way he was used to pain receding after a couple of codeine tablets or a cortisone injection administered to treat a chronic injury. The strangeness wasn't the priority and he wasn't the sort of person to speculate pointlessly. He had his growing intuition about what it all meant and would act on that in dealing with it. In confronting it, he thought. It had to be confronted and overcome. He had never been a man comfortable with losing.

The hipster archivist mounted the cine film expertly on a projector reel and pulled down a rolled screen and shut the blinds in a ritual he could have carried out before arrival, Tom thought, and imagined he hadn't only because he wanted to demonstrate his dexterity at one of the practical aspects of his job.

‘Do you mind if I watch it with you?'

‘Haven't you seen it already?'

‘Only for verification, to see if it corresponded to what it said it was on the can. It was shot at St. Moritz in the late March of 1963. I saw snow, skis, chalets and big skies. I didn't really take in the narrative detail.'