The Unblemished (6 page)

Claire continued her vigil, rubbing at a sore, red area of skin
beneath her armpit.

'What's that?' Sarah asked. 'Rash? You having a reaction to the
bedsheets or something?'

A shake of the head.

'Want me to get you some ointment?'

Another shake.

'Okay,' Sarah relented. 'So. Breakfast? Boiled eggy? Soldiers?'

Claire turned to her and – more pain – she smiled, one right out of
her infancy. Sometimes she seemed to be rallying. Sometimes Sarah
felt they could almost see an end to the running and rebuild the
crumbled foundations of their relationship. It was bad enough that
her family had been ruined; she had resigned herself to an uncertain
future. But she could do without Claire's distance. She needed her
daughter as an ally, even though the pain of what had happened must
be worse for her. She hoped that her condition, whatever it was, was
a temporary symptom of the damage of all this upheaval, not a
permanent result of it.

She dressed, taking care that Claire could not see her, wincing as
the fabric drew across the tender incisions she had made. Her breasts
sang with pain where she'd criss-crossed them with the blade; her belly
looked as if it had been shot with pellets.

Downstairs there was no sign of Nick or his manager so Sarah left
a note thanking them for their kindness but could they stay longer,
and might there be a chance of some work? She often found that
written pleas like this were successful. It gave someone time to think
no
, and then,
I can't do that to someone
, and then,
well, maybe
and
yes, all right.
If you asked them straight out and they said no, you
might be fifty miles along the motorway before their heart had a
chance to soften.

She and Claire walked a short distance to a little tea shop located
on a small side street not far from where the car was parked. They
had hot buttered toast, bacon and eggs, and sugary tea. The simple
meal lifted Sarah, and Claire seemed to come out of herself a little,
commenting on the fresh, lemon-coloured decoration, and the little
sign on the door which read
Credit is given, but only if customers are
accompanied by both great-great-grandparents.

They could have been any normal mother and daughter, enjoying
a day out together at the coast. The threat of Manser was as fleeting
as a message in the sand. They walked slowly along the beach
towards the pier, picking through the pebbles for shells or warm,
golden stones that might or might not be amber washed up from the
Baltic Sea. Claire stood with her hands in her long, curly blonde hair,
looking out at the horizon, and again Sarah was winded by how
mature she was. She was tall and limber. Her daughter.
Her daughter.
She felt a surge of love and pride move through her and she went and
stood next to her and put her arm around her shoulders.

'I love you,' she said.

Claire leaned her head against her mother's arm. 'I love you, too.'

They shared a large mug of hot chocolate on the pier, and bought
each other cheap novelties from the coin-operated dispensers.

'The sky seems too big,' Claire said.

Beyond the distant shape of Sizewell to the south, great
mushrooms of black cloud were rising. To the north, sunlight painted
a series of obliques above the sea. The sky was filled with weather.
The wind was cold, fresh and good. The future suddenly seemed as
clean and unbroken as the horizon.

They walked back to the hotel where a note had been pinned to
the door.
Room, yes. Job, no. But come and talk to me. Nick

She left Claire and went hunting for the barman. He was in his
own room, a small attic space barely big enough for a folding bed and
a small table. On the walls were some framed album covers –
Grace,
To Bring You My Love, The Soul Cages, OK Computer
– and
pictures of models in bikinis torn from glossy magazines.
Embarrassed, he explained that he was studying fashion design. It
touched her that he was moved to defend himself, as if he were trying
not to besmirch himself in her eyes. She liked the attention. She had
not played the game for a long time.

He told her he had a friend, Ray, who ran a junk shop off the main
road, just before it pushed on alone out of the village. Ray was getting
on a bit and could do with some help. He wouldn't be able to pay
much, but it would cover the room, which, the manager had decided,
she could have for less if she was to stay longer. The village didn't
exactly close down over winter, but the difference was striking. Nick
said there might be other odd jobs going – bar work, cleaning – but
that she'd be lucky to find anything. Most of the pubs during the
winter employed a single member of staff behind the bar serving, at
peak periods, one customer and a dog.

In the time it took Sarah to have this conversation, and to gently
rebuff his offer of a drink, Claire had shut down again. The bruises
of the coming evening mirrored the darkness settling into the skin
around her eyes. Her lips were ruddy; everything else was turning to
porcelain.

'Claire?' she said. Her daughter didn't reply, but pushed softly past
her and lay on the bed.

'Claire? Can you hear me?'

Her daughter pressed her hands against her breasts, traced a
journey down to the tops of her thighs and stroked herself there, in
small circular movements.

Sarah swallowed, looked away. 'Claire,' she said.

Claire licked her lips. She said, 'You know how small a foetus is at
three weeks old?'

Sarah couldn't speak. She shook her head, both in reply to the
question and in utter confusion.

'It's no bigger than a grain of rice. I felt it being ingested. I felt my
baby being sucked clean away, by ... by ...'

Sarah put out a hand. Claire's eyes were closed. There was a smile
on her face. She continued to stroke at herself.

She licked her lips again. She said, 'He comes for me.'

He scrubbed and lathered his skin and hair, the suds still pink. He
would find traces in the creases of his skin for days after; that
was blood for you. Steam filled the wet room completely, like being
in fog. He loved his showers as ragingly hot as he could stand them.
It was all or nothing for him. He used to fantasise about what his
nickname might be were he to be something special in a field where
nicknames were
de rigueur
: boxing perhaps, or mass murder.
Malcolm 'The Ton' Manser was his favourite. Whatever he was interested
in, he gave a hundred per cent. His website's address was
www.mcm.com.
He had a large 'C' tattooed on his left biceps.

The gorgeous bitch currently losing consciousness in his fuck pad
knew how full chisel he was, how dedicated. A man who could
bench-press 450 pounds, do 600 press-ups, 400 crunches and piss a
five-mile run in half an hour before breakfast was of a particular, if
not peculiar, focus. He could not remember his mother and father
and took this as a blessing. It meant he had nothing to live up to, no
standards to meet save his own. It was as if he were the first in a new
strain of human beings. He was Adam, in his own way. And he was
strong.

He switched off the scalding water and stood under an ice-cold jet
for a full minute, just like James Bond. He towelled off in front of a
full-length mirror in the anteroom adjoining his bedroom. He shaved
his head and touched up the trimmed black beard, making sure the
tops of his sideburns were militarily squared off level with the top of
his ears. He applied Shu Uemura massage refiner and Clinique
Moisture Surge to his skin and dressed quickly, pulling from his walk in
wardrobe a red John Smedley rollneck sweater, a pair of black
Hussein Chalayan trousers and a Donna Karan raincoat. Kenzo
shoes. Rolex Oyster. The Randolphs. He closed the bedroom door
and padded over to the locked room where he had left her. Cocked
his head against the jamb, listened for a few seconds. Still breathing.
Shallow, irregular. Near the end.

Downstairs, he read the newspaper, circling with a Mont Blanc
fountain pen a few horses for the afternoon races at Towcester,
Lingfield, and Market Rasen. He placed thousand-pound bets with
his bookies. He chose horses whose names chimed with him,
regardless of the odds: Musclebullet, The Pioneer, King of Roads. He
made five more phone calls: Jez Knowlden, his driver, to drop by in
the Audi in twenty minutes; Pamela, his wife, to say that he would
be away for the weekend; Jade, his mistress, to ask her if she'd meet
him in London. Doc Losh to get him to come and clean up his mess
and find him a number four. And then Chandos, his police mole, to
see if that cunt Sarah Hickman had been found yet.

Manser always watches while Doctor Losh does what he gets paid
handsomely to do. He does not look away. He has to be there to step
in quick before the amputee's life pulses out of her stumps. And
anyway, it would be a bit rich to come over all queasy.

The procedure for amputating a limb is dependent upon the area
where the scalpel and the Gigly saw are to go in. Manser is a strictly
'above knee amputation' devotee. He doesn't get off on the fingerless,
the handless, the armless; it's got to be the legs, both of them, about
halfway up the femur. Losh is quick and discreet, if not the
consummate professional. Hygiene is more likely to be something
he'd say in greeting to a woman than a prerequisite to surgery.

The textbook amputation calls for a large, circumferential incision
to be made into the skin around the thigh, shaped like a fish's mouth
to facilitate the neat closure of the wound after limb removal.
The musculature and other soft tissue must then be divided around
the thighbone. Veins, arteries, and nerves are transected and the
femur separated with an oscillating saw. The end must be bevelled
and smoothed to prevent any pain from the stump later, when introduced
to a prosthetic limb. The skin flaps are folded over the stump
and sutured.

Dr Losh does not own a scalpel or a Gigly saw. He has an
amputation knife from the 1790s made by Laundy of St Thomas
Street, bought on eBay for thirty-five notes, and a hacksaw purchased
from the local B&Q. He does not operate by the book. He is fast,
efficient, dirty.

A Marlboro red in the corner of his mouth, his apron cracked with
the patterns of dried blood from his previous patient, Losh assesses
the girl, who is gagged and restrained on the bench with half a dozen
nylon ties. He's spilling ash on her thigh as he unwraps the curved
amputation knife from a fishmonger's flimsy carrier bag and drops to
his knees. Losh curls his arm under the leg so that the sharp, inner
curve is resting on the top of the flesh, the tip a mere few centimetres
from his own nose. He executes the
coup de maître
swiftly, cutting
deep, sweeping the blade around the leg, bringing the hilt of the knife
sharply back to him, and standing up in the same motion. Meat parts;
bone is the wet tooth glistening up through a bloody grin. Her body
arcs in shock and pain; two of the nylon ties sink through her skin.
He quickly saws through the femur and repeats the operation on the
other leg.

Manser is as hard as a brick by now. There's no time, no point in
suturing the hot, spurting wounds. Losh is transferring the three
grand into a money belt around his waist while Manser is losing
himself to the feel of her, slick and denuded, flapping around his hips.
'You want these leftovers, or what?' Losh asks.

He encloses his hands around her stumps as he comes. If she's at
all conscious, he doesn't see, can't see. Losh is long gone by the time
he returns to the world. So is the girl, usually. Sometimes they cling
on for a while, as if something inside them was inspiring hope.

He wants the Hickman bitch for his number four.

Salavaria
, he thought.

Manser parked his S-Type at the leading edge of the deep forest. If
he listened hard he could hear the faint shush of traffic on the M1, a
mile or two south. He reached inside the car for a plastic lunch box
and a black leather document wallet. He put these in a rucksack and
slung it over his shoulders. He had collected the sandwiches from
Losh that morning, as he always did, once a week, on the day of his
visit to Fetter Woods. Six days' worth of photographs in the wallet
had all been printed directly from a memory stick the previous
evening. He set off into the trees.

Salavaria.

He was still impressed by his feats, achieved in a different decade,
a different century. Manser's murders were almost a by-product of
his intent, an unavoidable side effect of his need. Death was not the
goal for him, and it had been a surprise to discover that Gyorsi
Salavaria's crimes, in this way, were similar to his own.

The monster's lair announces itself about two miles into a part of the
woods where the canopy is so dense there is permanent twilight. The
first indication is a single, lichen-covered block of stone in a clearing
that is really nothing of the sort. There are no well-established trees
here, just a swarming pile of shrubbery that looks as though it has
been dumped rather than rooted. Foundations are visible through the
moss. More stones. Move deeper and the stones find some kind of
form. They climb to a point where they create impressive shadows in
the dappled sunlight. They are enough to warrant a window frame,
albeit naked. Spiders' webs so thick they create the illusion of frosted
glass stretch across the gaps. A shattered doorway stands at the head
of a flight of steps turned green with lichen and time. Manser strides
up them, recognising his footprints from his previous visit, one week
before. The rucksack is hot now against his back despite the time of
year; he is aware of sweat ringing his neck, the waistband of his black
trousers.

It is still a strange feeling for him, as used to this place as he is, to
walk a corridor that has no ceiling. It feels faintly ridiculous, and not
for the first time he has the peculiar sense that he has never before
been here, that there is nothing to see, that the ruins will turn back to
rubble as he proceeds, that the trees will take over once more, that
there will eventually be a road leading away.

Insects cling to the walls like strange decoration, the dead
carapaces providing the only sounds as he strides forwards, crunching
underfoot.

Out of the confusion of stone and creeping vegetation, he sees
faces where there are none, surging from the shadows like something
exuded. The walls develop greater height, and now parts of a ceiling
appear. Rooms suddenly stitch themselves out of the fabric of green
and black. Things skitter within them, either too blind and damaged
to reach the open doorways, or more preferring of the thick gloom.
He thinks he hears singing, but it is over almost before he can identify
it as such.

At the end of the corridor, a windowless room with its door
hanging off the hinges. Out of the dark, one hand reaches to curl
around the splintered, rotting jamb. It grips so hard that the knuckles
whiten in an instant.

Gyorsi Salavaria says, 'I like what you bring me, Malcolm.'

He thought back to their first meeting, arranged after Salavaria had
written to him, specifically to him, expressing his admiration for his
crimes and wishing to meet him face to face.

'Why?' he had mouthed, unable to summon a squeak of sound
when he stood before the great man for the first time.

'Do you know what it is like to float in a bath of blood?' Salavaria
had whispered in reply. 'To sleep in a bed with corpses that cannot
close their eyes? Do you know the feeling, when you take something
as incontrovertibly positive as life and turn it, with your own hands,
against everything that is outlined in its code, to oppose what nature
intended?'

Ostensibly this was no longer the man who had torn an unborn
child from the womb of Emily Tasker and partially devoured its face
while the mother haemorrhaged to death. His withdrawal from the
game had apparently ruined him, left a husk that was so fragile it
would be blown away by the breeze. But Manser never bought that.
He saw Salavaria's strength. The body might seem to have dwindled,
but there was sinew there, and force, and the brains and blood that
powered it were stronger than ever.

Today though, he could see that something was seriously wrong.
Salavaria was sitting in a steel chair fastened to the floor with rusting
bolts. His chin rested against his chest, his grey hair tumbling
forwards. He appeared exhausted. He seemed to have shrunk inside
his clothes. Manser wondered if there was an illness he had not been
told about. He wondered if guilt had come charging into this
vulnerable body, after all this time, and had finally broken him. He
couldn't believe that.

Manser waited. He had cleared his throat, said hello, the first time
he had visited and had not been acknowledged for another five
minutes. Salavaria knew he was here. And Manser, after all, was no
stranger to waiting.

Thirty years on, still, with some frequency, the bones of his crimes
were picked over by the carrion eaters who published the red tops
every morning. There was a regular froth over the fact that he had
escaped arrest for so long, usually when a new editor was appointed.
Or the flames of fear were fanned with an article on the most
dangerous men in the UK still at large. Salavaria – or rather, because
they did not know his real name,
The Picnic Man
– featured prominently
in those. Some ventured that he must have died; it was the only
answer for the sudden end to the sequence of killing. Some said that
if he was still at large, then he must be a harmless old man now,
whose reputation was being stoked by lurid journalists.

But a new generation was unmoved by his crimes, despite the
tabloids' sanctimonious outrage. Salavaria was old school. He was
slowly being forgotten.

'I smell lunch,' Salavaria said. His voice had never lost its
Romanian accent, the slashed vowels, the unusual intonation, the
unexpected pauses and stresses. Perhaps because nobody ever spoke
to him. He had chosen this life of voluntary solitary confinement; it
made for a dull existence if you liked to converse. Salavaria did not
seem to mind. He had books, a radio, and these had kept him sane.
If, Manser reasoned, you could call someone sane who carried slices
of thymus around in peach paper on the off chance he grew peckish.
But then, who was Manser to cast judgement on sanity? He
chuckled lightly to himself; Salavaria raised his head. His eyes were
the palest green, like the iridescent flash of mould on a shaving of
ham. When they favoured you, it felt like you were slowly being
reamed out. Thick white eyebrows beetled at the slightest change of
expression. His face appeared sucked in, as if something had
deflated him, but the skeletal appearance was offset by the shining
beauty of his skin. It was elastic, uncreased, as smooth and
colourful as that of someone half his age.

'You find something funny?'

'Not really,' Manser replied. 'Just my twisted mind.'

'Your twisted mind is what I rely upon,' Salavaria said. 'Don't ever
attempt to straighten it out.' Salavaria winked at Manser, who again
felt a surge of pride that he had been chosen above all others. He felt
affection, maybe even love, for the man and slid the greaseproof
packet across the table.

'I'll try my best,' Manser said.

'I'm famished,' Salavaria said. His hands shook as they lifted one
white triangle with its insert of pinkish meat. As he bit into it, his eyes
rolled back into his head.

Just like a shark
, Manser thought.

He could not watch him finish the sandwich. Not because of the
animal way he devoured it, although that was shocking enough,
but because it disturbed even him to see slices of a woman he'd
slept with the previous night being consumed. This was Jacqueline
Kay, or at least a part of her, a student he had picked up in a pub
on the Finchley Road six days earlier.