The Sacrificial Man (38 page)

“He was afraid, that was all.” I can only manage a few words, my chest is so full, so large. My ears throb to an urgent rhythm and I hold the table to calm the first wave of dizziness. “He needed me to take control, to help him fulfil his destiny. When he drank the whisky he knew the drug was in it.” My voice sounds unfamiliar, echoing itself, carved out of stone.

“So you admit you killed him? Oh, Alice.”

“But he wanted to die! The diary must confirm that?”

“It confirms everything, Alice. Why he placed the advert and why he wanted to be eaten.” She says the words softly, “CJD can’t be transmitted by sex. But it can be passed on through blood, through flesh. You did eat part of him, Alice, didn’t you?”

I nod, slowly. My head pounds in protest at the movement.

“I’m no expert so I’ve briefed the court doctor. Tomorrow he’ll be able to give you more information about the potential risk of you contracting CJD. But I didn’t want you to hear it first from a stranger.”

I’m the student now. I don’t understand. I refuse to understand. If I tried to use words I would stumble. My palms are sweaty and I look to the door with longing.

“He wanted to infect you, Alice. That was his intention. That was why he asked you to eat him.”

“No! He wanted me to eat him so that he could live in me. So he could live on.”

“That’s what he told you.” She says sadly.

“He wanted me to catch the disease?” Is Smith watching me now, from wherever the dead go, enjoying this moment? Tears relay down my cheeks, surprising my mouth with their salt. I can’t make sense of the jumble in my head. “But how did the diary get to be with you?”

“David wrote his final entry here, on his laptop, before he told you he’d changed his mind. He downloaded the diary onto a memory stick and posted it. He sent it to Krishna Dasi, a colleague he trusted, along with a note that said he wanted to travel. Krishna assumed he was talking about death, that it was a metaphor. I did too, until I read the final entry in the diary.

“Krishna didn’t hand the memory stick over straightaway because he didn’t want to get involved. He knew he would be implicated if he did because he’d given David a drug dealer’s name which was mentioned in the diary and he knew David had died of an overdose. Also, Krishna wanted to protect his friend, knowing that he had originally planned to infect you. Thankfully, in the end, he realised he had no right to keep it to himself.”

“But how did you come to have it?” My heart is slowing now, exhausted with effort. My limbs are heavy and the headache is now reigning in my brain, waves of pain that make me want to lie down in a dark room.

“Krishna gave it to me, the last time we were at court.”

I’m trying to listen. I’m trying to concentrate, despite the pain. Smith wanted to infect me with his disease. But then he changed his mind – he tried to stop it happening. In the end he wanted to save me. In going ahead with the plan I condemned myself.

“David thought he could stop the plan, call it off. But he was wrong, wasn’t he Alice? You weren’t going to let him go. You murdered him before he could do that.”

“It wasn’t murder. We had a plan. It had all been agreed.” She’s looking at me with disgust but also with pity.

“In the end he couldn’t bring himself to harm you.”

I see it suddenly, my mistake. My failure to recognise love. In the end Smith didn’t want to harm me. He loved me.

“What happens now?” I ask, “I’m being sentenced tomorrow.”

“My report reflects exactly what I’ve found out. It’s already filed with the court, and the USB is now with the police. There will be a new trial, but with a new charge. You’ll be charged with murder.”

I remember the story that scared me so much as a child, the tale of the woman with the jigsaw puzzle. Of the axe man at the window. When I first heard it I was twelve and I cried and cried until Dad came to take me home. And now, over twenty years later, I feel like I’m twelve again. I can’t stop crying. Only now I’m alone in my house and no-one is coming to save me. I had the jigsaw laid out, and thought I knew what the picture was, but when Cate Austin came today she showed me that I was wrong. Then she put in the final piece. She showed me the real picture and it’s horrible.

There has been a man at my window all along. Even worse, he’d already broken in and attacked me with a poisoned axe and I didn’t even feel it. And now there could be disease in my veins. All the headaches, dizziness, sickness…

All these months when the police and the courts have been interrogating me, trying to discover if Smith wanted to die, deciding if I was a criminal, and all the time I was the victim. They arrested the wrong person. Smith has murdered me. He’s condemned me to a life of watching and waiting for telltale signs of a disease that may never materialise.

I thought we had achieved so much. The best, the perfect moment of death. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. I thought he loved me when he wanted to die, but now I see that in wanting to live he was trying to protect me. But I failed to protect myself.

I can’t bear this. I will not bear it. When Cate Austin has gone I reach for my telephone and dial, knowing there is only one person who can save me now.

I wait for my lover to arrive. My hair is loose and I wear a long white dress. I could be going to a wedding, if it was not for the fact that upstairs, hidden under the pillow, is a knife. I don’t think I breathe until I hear the knocking on the door. Until I open it and feel Lee’s arms tight around me. Her grip allows me to fall, the pain in my chest rising in my throat. There’s no choice but to surrender, to let her love me. She guides me back into the house and closes the door.

“I thought I might be too late. That you would be on the plane to Germany.”

Lee’s lips are on my ear. “There was no plane, Alice, not tonight anyway. I was going to be in court tomorrow, in the viewing gallery. I didn’t want to tell you that I knew everything. It had to be your choice, and you wanted to keep it from me. I respected that.”

“But you knew?”

“I always knew. It’s why I came back.”

Of course, of course she knew. She knows me. She knows the weight of my silence. Lee wipes the tears from my chin, my cheek. She takes her fingers and strokes my face as she’s done a million times, as if her only desire is to comfort me. She shows no surprise, only concern. No fear, only love.

“Have you never stopped to ask yourself, Alice, why it all happened last year? You’re the same person you’ve been since you were a teenager – why then and not any other year?”

“Because that was when I found Smith.”

“But it was also when you started looking – when you needed to find something, someone. Because, after being together since we were five-years-old, I’d left. Don’t you see?”

“What?”

“It was me, Alice. Our love. That’s what kept you stable. Kept you safe. But last year I was posted to Germany. That’s when things went wrong.”

I’m silent. Is it true? “I love you, Alice. I should never have left you. I won’t leave you again.”

I’m crying again, collapsing into her, letting her hold me like a strengthening force. Is she right? Was Smith’s death not what I longed for, not the remembrance of love past, newly tasted. Lee will give me that. She gives me a sense of it already. It can only be her. I know she can make it right.

When I’m finally still she asks, “What has happened, Alice? Why are you like this now? Is it because of the sentencing tomorrow?”

Her arms are tight, holding me fast. Her mouth places kisses on my neck like pearls. I long to tell her everything but my mouth is a fortress, keeping it back. I can’t tell her that I’m diseased.

“I know, Alice,” she whispers. “I know about David Jenkins. Alice, Alice, my sweet love… ” I struggle to turn from her, and she releases me slightly, but I’m still in her embrace, turned away. She rocks me. I give in to myself, let my weight be hers. I’m a child again and she is my parent. I close my eyes and allow it, feeling what it is to be loved. I must forget the disease in my brain, planted like a bad seed.

I remember my mother. I think of her cool skin, her freshly painted pink toenails. Being alone with her that final time, my head on her chest. I want it back, so much, that love. I want her back…

“Let’s go upstairs,” I say.

Lee leads me to the bedroom.

She undresses, watching me. I stand, in my white dress. I won’t be naked. When she is under the sheets she reaches for me, gently pulling me onto the soft mattress, next to her. I slide under the new sheets. Despite the warmth of her smile, I’m shaking. “Kiss me,” I say. “I want you to make love to me.”

Lee strokes me, pushes her thigh between my legs. She closes her eyes and it is then that I remove the knife from the pillow. She looks at me and the blade flashes in her pupils.

“Alice, please… put the knife down… ” The knife is still in my hand, but raised. The blade points to her heart. Now is the moment. “Alice, please… ”

I’m Lot’s wife, immobile and poised, pale as salt.

“It’s over, isn’t it, Lee?” The question comes from nowhere conscious, barely a movement, the sound of grains in an hourglass. “They’ll lock me away for life.”

She watches the knife as its blade touches her skin, my pale hand gripped to the wooden handle. “Whatever happens Alice, we can sort this out. I’ll never go away again, but first I want you to give me the knife.”

She moves slowly, as if managing a lion that has pinned her to the back of the cage. I could pounce at any moment, but our bodies are still close, alongside each other, her leg between mine. My heart palpitates and I’m sure she must see beads of sweat on my lip. Does she still find me beautiful?

Slowly, so very slowly, Lee covers my hand with her own and we hold the knife together. She pulls the length of the blade forward so it punctures her breast. “Is this what you want, Alice? To kill me?”

She coaxes my hand forward, the tip of the blade digging further into her flesh, towards her heart. A bead of blood blooms on the silver like a ruby, and Lee watches me, never breaking eye contact. “Alice, is this what you want?”

Like cracks appearing in marble, my composure dissolves, my voice loud and stuttering. “He betrayed me! He lied! I thought it was what we wanted. What I thought was love was his desire to infect me. I’m sick, Lee, I think I’m dying. Smith murdered me.”

I pull the handle hard so the knife is over my own heart. The tip is razor sharp and cuts as it falls, but I no longer wield it. Surrendered, I crumple into the mattress. Finally, I cry like a child.

Lee holds me, still with the knife in her grip. Kisses me. I won’t hurt anymore. She whispers, intimate words. This was the moment I sought all along. The gift of love. She loves me, even now. Even knowing I have killed a man. Even knowing I may be diseased. Unconditional, immovable love. I don’t need her death to make love immortal: she won’t abandon me.

She will never leave.

It is morning. Alice was to be sentenced today.

She lies on the floor, her pale skin almost translucent in the weak February sun, as her lover paints the last of her fingernails a pretty shade of pink.

Lee takes the cardigan from the chest of drawers. Hand knitted, lilac wool, with a precious pearl button. The blood from the wound on Alice’s breast is dried, clotted dark. Lee touches it, feeling the bump of fresh scar tissue.

“Are you cold, my darling?” she asks, taking the cardigan and wrapping it around Alice’s shoulder. “You’re with your Mummy now. You won’t be cold anymore.”

Lee strokes her beloved’s arm, kisses her, knowing that this time, this final time, there will be no bad dreams, no nightmares, to disturb Alice’s sleep.

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