The Evil Seed (32 page)

I shrugged and did as he
asked.

‘There isn’t any need to
be so careful,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got a gun.’

He ignored that, and I
sensed rather than saw him bring out his card from his breast pocket. He read
my rights quickly, without expression, like a little boy reciting grace before
his birthday dinner.

‘Take off your coat.’

I did so, watching as he
searched the pockets by feel, still looking at me from the eye of his gun. He
threw the coat back to me, keeping out of range of my hands.

‘Put it on.’

‘You needn’t have
worried,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt you.’ That was true enough; what I
had felt as I hid in the yard of the warehouse, that kind of love, invaded me
again. I wanted to touch him, to make him real in my mind. I wanted to talk to
him, to hear his voice. I wanted his wife, his children, his memories, his
secrets, his bad habits. I wanted the cigarettes he smoked, the food he ate,
the dreams he dreamed.

‘You can turn round now,’
he told me as his companion moved towards me to fasten the handcuffs around my
wrists. To my mind, the situation was unreal, and I an observer, watching with
a kind of detached interest, like a man who knows himself to be dreaming.

‘Thank you.’ As I turned
I saw his face with great clarity. Thin light sketched his features in
graveyard grey, highlighting the outline of the gun in his hand. I know nothing
about guns; I couldn’t even guess if it was loaded.

‘You killed Elaine,’ I
told him as we walked towards the Wolsley. ‘That was her name. Elaine.’

‘Who was she, Holmes?
Your lady friend?’

‘No.’

‘Where does she fit into
all this, then?’

‘She was a victim,’ I
said. ‘Like me.’ Suddenly, I realized how tired I was. Like a dreamer awakening
from a nightmare, I felt drained of everything. Perhaps it was the fact that
Rosemary was beyond my grasp, possibly for ever, perhaps it was remembering
Elaine’s face as she died.

At that instant I gave
it all up, the glamour, the promise of eternity, the power and the beauty. It
hurt to give it up, but the giving was a deliverance.

‘I’ll tell you
everything,’ I said.

Two

HE HAD LEFT GINNY ASLEEP ON THE SOFA, AND
AS HE OPENED the door quietly to let himself out, he glanced back and saw her
curled up, her face tucked into the crook of her arm. A sensation of utter
protectiveness overwhelmed him. Joe, who was normally as jumpy and ill at ease
as an adolescent, whose life was a constant roller-coaster of highs and lows,
had experienced only a very few moments of true stability. Asked to define his
life, the word ‘comfortable’ wouldn’t even have had a mention. And yet now it
seemed to him that all his insecurities had been bled away, that some
miraculous transfusion had taken place so that suddenly he felt in control, all
tension drained from his body. He went down into the street, the new sense of
well-being inside him. He was smiling.

Two girls in jeans and
T-shirts looked at him strangely, almost drawing away, despite the hour and the
bright sunlight
…
one of them, trying later to explain why the memory
of the man remained with her even though Cambridge was full of strange people,
could only vaguely remember why.

‘His eyes were creepy,’
she said at ten o’clock in the Union Bar that evening, voice charmingly slurred
after five gin and tonics. In a novel, she might have been able to say:
‘His
eyes were like a doorway into another world.’
But in real life she simply got
drunk, went to bed with a young man from another college who she didn’t even
like, and woke up the next day with a depressive hangover and a vague sense of
something lost.

Joe went on his way
without even noticing her, riding the carousel of his thoughts. Absently he
rubbed his knuckles, noticing as he looked down that the back of his left hand
was dark with bruising.

It was Alice’s fault.
Experimentally he flexed the hand.

Damn, it hurt. He
wondered whether he had broken any bones. It was his left hand, the one he
needed most when he was playing. If Alice had made him bust his left hand
…
Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen her show much sympathy. In fact, he
wasn’t at all sure she hadn’t been glad. Well, he’d get that straight when he
saw her, too. He’d promised Ginny he’d square things with Alice, and he would.
She’d done enough damage as it was. He might as well square it with her now.
Still smiling, he quickened his step.

Alice picked up the knife, testing its
weight. It was a long carving-knife from her kitchen, wooden-handled and
singing with sharpness. It made Alice feel almost faint to even think of using
it on a person, but by now the worst of the sickness and the shaking had
dissipated, to be replaced by a sense of unreality, as if true logic had been
replaced by the strange surrealist logic of dreams. Just follow, thought Alice
to herself. The knife knew where it was going far better than she did. Like the
point of a compass it showed the way, implacably, back to the house in
Grantchester.

Alice swallowed with
difficulty, wondering if she dared eat anything, but even at the thought she
felt herself gag in nausea, and turned towards the door. There could be no more
delaying it, she knew. She had to be in Grantchester before night, when the night-walkers
came.

She had taken two steps
towards the door, was taking a third, when someone knocked.

Alice froze.

‘Dammit, she’s out.’ Joe
kicked angrily at the door, twice, but only managed to hurt his foot. He looked
at his watch; almost six. Ginny would be waiting for him at home, counting on
him; he didn’t want her to be alone in the house when night fell. She was so
afraid of the dark.

But it rankled, it
really did, to let Alice win, to go home to Ginny without having done what he
promised. Maybe if he … He looked round, saw no one in the street except an
old man with a dog. He turned, walked fifty yards or so down the street, then
turned into the alley which led round the back of the houses. He was certain
she was in there.

Alice’s garden was quite
large, long and overgrown with weeds and trees allowed to run wild. It was easy
enough to cut across the neighbour’s garden into hers, easier still to make his
way through the tangle of bushes and flowers until he reached her back porch.
Joe looked over his shoulder again, and idly tried the back door. It was
locked, but he had expected that. He looked at the lock, decided that it was
too strong to force. But there was a window. Forcing himself to be calm, he
picked up a stone from the path. He lifted it to shoulder height, then tapped
it — a tap was all it needed — against the corner of the glass. The window
cracked. Gently, so as not to cut himself, he pushed the glass, pressed it
until a corner of it loosened. Then he worked at the loose part until it came out
of the frame altogether. He laid the piece of glass on the path beside him,
began to work on another piece. It came easily this time, and bit by bit he
soon managed to free the whole of the pane. One pane was all he needed; it was
enough for him to be able to push his arm through the door and unlatch it.

He looked inside. ‘Alice?’
he called softly. ‘Alice?’

One

IN 1948 THE POLICE STATION IN CAMBRIDGE WAS
MUCH smaller than it is today; there was one officer on duty that night, and he
blinked stupidly as he saw the Inspector and I come in. I suppose that he had
heard all about the excitement earlier that night; there was a morgue too,
annexed to that little station, and maybe he had seen them bring in Elaine from
the ambulance. I imagined her lying, somewhere behind one of those doors, her
hair spread out like a mermaid’s on the white enamel. With my new,
all-encompassing affection for humans and their world, I smiled at the duty
officer.

‘Don’t be worried,’ I
said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

‘Be quiet,’ snapped
Turner. Then, addressing the other man: ‘Have you contacted the Yard yet?’

The officer nodded. ‘Yes,
sir. Someone’ll be here in about an hour.’

‘Good,’ said Turner. ‘Hold
the fort for a while. I’m going to take a statement from the suspect.’

For a lazy instant, I
wondered what he meant, then I realized that the suspect was me. The thought
made me laugh again. It felt good.

‘This way, please,’ said
Turner, directing me to the far end of the police station. I was absurdly
pleased by his polite tone; everything about him pleased me then. I turned and
smiled.

‘In here,’ he said. He
was near enough for me to see his eyes, cold and grey as nails hammered into
his face.

A little square room,
tiled in white, as I had imagined the morgue, with a little table, two chairs
and a latrine bucket in the corner. A strong smell of disinfectant hung in the
air, reminding me, comically, of the boys’ toilets in the junior school I had
attended as a child.

‘Sit down.’

I chose the chair next
to the wall, took off my coat and sat on it. Turner sat on the table, looking
down at me, his eyes unreadable. The PC who had been with him when he came in
had joined us, and was sitting opposite, pen poised over a little pad of paper
to write down what I said.

We waited like that, in
silence, for a long time. After a few minutes, I recognized Turner’s technique
of allowing the criminal to incriminate himself and, despite myself, I grinned.
I
wanted
to incriminate myself, wanted to rejoin society, even at its
lowest level; I had no desire to escape. I felt almost light-headed; there were
no more choices to be made, no more decisions, nothing. It had all been done,
though, decided for me.

‘So, what do you want to
know?’ I said.

‘Why you did it,’ said
Turner. ‘The vagrant woman in the weir. Those people in the pub. And what about
the body we found in Grantchester churchyard, all cut up into pieces? Was that
you, too?’

I shook my head.

‘It wasn’t me, but I was
there. It was the others. Rosemary.’

Turner nodded, although
I could not tell by anything he said or any movement he made whether he
believed me or not.

‘Rosemary?’

I told him.

I told him everything I
knew or had conjectured about her, exposed her utterly. I betrayed them all. I
cleansed myself of them. Inspector Turner showed no sign of reaction at all; he
simply listened politely, nodding from time to time as if I were simply
corroborating something he already knew. When I had finished, he stood up, and
I looked at him expectantly.

‘Are you going to arrest
them?’ I asked.

‘I’m going to get some
coffee,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to be a long night. Maybe by the time I
get back, you’ll have thought up a better story than that. I can wait. I like
stories.’

And at that he and his
companion left the room, shutting the door behind them.

I waited, knowing that
he would come back soon. After a while, thinking about the coffee, and while I
still had some privacy, I went and used the latrine bucket.

I must have dozed for half an hour or so,
when I was awoken by the sound of footsteps. Someone was walking down the
passage, their feet making a light pattering sound on the tiles. I remember
thinking what a light tread the Inspector had. The footsteps stopped outside
the door of the cell; I heard someone fumbling with keys, pulling the latch. I
looked idly towards the door as it opened, then froze.

It was Elaine.

She was barefoot, her
toes blue with cold against the tiles, and she was wearing a kind of hospital
robe, stiff white linen, tied at the sides with white ribbons. Her face was even
paler than usual. There was blood at the side of her mouth, as if she had fed
too greedily, and blood had trickled down the inside of her leg, leaving a
broad track of dark-red going up from her ankle out of sight into the robe. Her
hair was like seaweed, her eyes brimming. With a shock, I realized that what
she was wearing was not a hospital robe at all.

My system must have
shielded me against the shock; it is one thing to believe, academically, in
eternal life, and another entirely to watch a dead woman come back from the
dead. I gaped, my head reeling, thinking: another ride on Rosemary’s ghost
train.

Elaine beckoned,
wordlessly, and until the same happens to you, you will never understand the
compulsion of that gesture, its not-to-be-disobeyed power. In a similar way
does the statue of the dead commander beckon Don Juan to his last meal. There
was no refusing her. I stood up, feeling faint, though by then I was used to
horrors, and followed her, without a word, into the corridor. The door leading
to the morgue was half-open, and as I passed, I glanced in. It was how I had
imagined it: the tiles white in a crude electric light, half a dozen bare slabs
for the bodies, the tiny sound of running water, trickling down the gutters by
the sides of the room. I followed her into the front of the station, rubbing my
eyes. Dark flowers blossomed behind my eyelids.

The station was a
butcher’s shop. Two men lay facedown on the floor in pools of tacky blood;
someone, in his struggles, had struck the wall as he fell, stricken, and had
left the prints of his hands and his body against the white paint, like grisly
negatives. A third was slumped across the desk, his head twisted at an
unnatural angle; Anton was sitting on the desk beside him, using a scalpel to
cut pieces from his face, as absorbed as a child doing a jigsaw. Stunned as I
was, I managed to see all the bodies well enough to realize that none of them
was Turner. Somehow, the thought gave me an obscure satisfaction; but I said
nothing.