The Unblemished (7 page)

You need to fast them
, Dr Losh had advised him at the start.
Forty-eight
hours is best but you can get away with half that. Just give them
a little water, that's all.
It was part of his thrill, his fetish, he
supposed, that he must wait for them to be physically prepared for
the traumas their bodies had to be subjected to. Salavaria was an
extremely demanding person but he didn't care how the meat was
treated after his delicacies were harvested. Manser might have been
able to dispense with Dr Losh had Salavaria been happy to eat cold
cuts from a cadaver, but he was adamant that his slices of buttock
and breast be carved from a warm donor.

Manser's prick stirred as he recalled the way he had slid, unhindered,
into Ms Kay that morning, the expression on her face of dulled
shock that her body was still being ravaged, that she was still having
to endure this.
When does it give up?
she seemed to be asking.
When
is enough too much?

Now he heard the balling of the greaseproof paper and a clearing
of the throat. Manser returned his attention to the other man in time
to see him dabbing crumbs from the tabletop with the tip of a finger.

A comma of grease on his chin provided the welcome break to a
terrible sentence.

Salavaria's eyes were glazed. His voice was content, sated, a little
sleepy when he said: 'Thank you, Malcolm.' And then: 'Do you have
the next menu ready for me?'

As Manser fiddled with the straps and buckles on the old leather
wallet, he totted up their atrocious total so far. Five years, nine
victims. Salavaria was insistent he feed once every six months. He had
not yet fully divulged the reasons for his proxy return to murder and
Manser was grateful for that. He did not much care to know. It was
enough that they were in league. He was pleasing a legend and being
allowed to pick through the leftovers for as long as was hygienic. Dr
Losh was a competent if slapdash surgeon and a great help when it
came to disposing of bodies, and body parts. It was a brilliant system;
he just had to make sure he remained careful, and travelled widely in
order to choose potential victims.
Don't defecate where you
masticate
, Salavaria had warned him, early on.

This philosophy informed the latest batch of 'applicants', as
Salavaria referred to them. From the wallet Manser extracted two
dozen black-and-white images, all taken in landscape mode, all 6" × 4".
None of the targeted subjects was aware of being photographed and
all of them were of a graininess to suggest they had been taken at long
range. Four from the tennis courts of a sixth-form college in
Sunderland; eight from a café in central Bristol; two on the beach at
Cardiff; three at a funfair outside Leicester; five on the ferry across
the Mersey; and two at a service station on the M6.

Salavaria placed one of this last pair to the side. He held its mate
with trembling hands. 'This one,' he said, falteringly. 'This one ...

how ... who ...'

Manser thought he was trying to establish how someone at a
service station could be tracked. All of his applicants would have been
followed to determine an address, should they need to be acquired at
a later date. He thought of explaining this to him, but Salavaria
finally spat out a complete question. 'Who is she?'

'She's the daughter of some cunt I nailed once,' Manser said, and
immediately apologised for his language. But Salavaria did not seem
to be aware of his indelicacy. 'I know where she lives,' he went on,
quickly. 'Her mother, that's her in the other picture, she's on tick up
to her tits and I've been giving her some heavy about it. Well, I was
until she upped sticks.'

'You mean you don't know where she is?'

'I've got my contacts. It won't be long. What? You want her on
toast?'

'Not her. I want the girl.'

Manser shifted uncomfortably. He was hoping Claire could be his
little bonus once the latest victim was selected. It wasn't even an in focus
shot of her: Sarah had been the option he had authorised. It
bothered him too that Salavaria's mask was slipping. He had never
displayed any signs of weakness before, but here he was with tears in
his eyes. His fingers trembled as they held the edges of the print.
Manser wanted to say something, but he felt he didn't have the words
Salavaria needed to hear, the depth of feeling. Now he seemed to be
muttering to himself. Within seconds he had turned from everybody's
bogeyman into wittering bag lady; granite to sandstone.

'Her,' Salavaria said. 'I want her.'

'Consider it done,' Manser said, battling to keep the irritation
from his voice. He tried to look at the good that might come of it. He
could at least finish his business with Sarah Hickman, teach her some
manners, some lessons. Maybe even introduce her to Dr Losh, and his
mattress, with its protective plastic sheeting. He could let her watch
while he had Claire stumped, and –

'But I don't want her ... spoiled in any way.'

'Gyorsi. We have a deal.'

'The deal is now changed,' the old man said, looking up at him
fully for the first time.

'But I don't understand,' Manser persisted. 'What good is she to
you in here? What good is she to you at all? You can't risk coming
back to normal life. You wouldn't last a second.'

Salavaria's eyes were those of a man half his age. He said, 'I am
coming back. But in order to do so I must
change.
'

Salavaria spoke at length, in great detail and without pause for
breath, almost as if this were a speech he had prepared and learned
over many years.

He told Manser what he needed and what Manser would do. By
the end of it, Manser was in tears.

Two young off-duty police officers, glory-seeking constables so
eager for a trophy collar they hadn't called for reinforcements,
got lucky. They were suspicious of this wiry man in his jeans and
pullover, his iron-grey ponytail tied neatly off at the back of his head.
They didn't like the way he hung around the sixth-form college, or
tried to chat to female students as they waited at the bus stop.

They lost him for a while, then one of them thought they saw
movement by the wooden fence surrounding a field. Locals tramped
across it in order to collect chestnuts in Thinways forest each
November. They followed the figure through deep snow to a
crumbling stone platform in an abandoned North Yorkshire train
station where they found him trying to swallow the heart of ten-year old
Jemima Cartledge. The rest of her body lay in the snow nearby,
ringed with an ugly spattered circle of blood and faeces. He'd
attempted to set fire to her corpse but her clothes were too damp. Her
singed hair sent an unbroken line of thin smoke into the cold blue sky.

'Kill me,' he'd begged them. They hadn't, so he had dispatched the
two of them, informing them of his retirement as they breathed their
last red gasps into the snow.

November 18, 1976. The Picnic Man. Gyorsi Salavaria. The final
bow.

He thought of that moment of his ending every day. He should not
have allowed it to happen. He had been weak. He'd had no faith. He
should have kept going, knowing that he would need to remain at the
peak of his fitness, both physically and mentally. This was not the
kind of thing you just tossed off, like a hobby. It took an enormous
amount of psychological steel to turn a living creature into a dead
thing. And now it was time to return to it. His enforced hibernation
was at an end. They expected him to turn it on, go back to being the
monster, the phantom, the slippery Picnic Man.

Everything that had occurred since then – the TV coverage, the
stupefaction that his reign of terror was suddenly over, this long
period of hiding, the self-doubt, the late-night radio phone-ins where
lonely women had asked for his hand in marriage – all of it seemed
to have come from a time before his retreat. Only that moment
seemed to exist within his memory with clarity. Everything else was
lustreless, befogged. He supposed that time in the snow, with a throat
full of warm blood, was the last time he had felt alive. Thirty years
withdrawn. Happy fucking birthday.

He could and should have gone on. He had endured a moment of
stupid weakness and it had deposited him in a self-imposed exile, a hell.

Once upon a time he had pranced clear of anybody with his scent
in their nostrils: young, intelligent, hungry, he was a man whose
senses had become super attenuated. A fly seeing the approaching
swipe almost before it has been launched. The police had been
moving through syrup. But he had allowed himself to be found
cheaply, for a momentary lack of confidence. He thought
his people
had abandoned him, were unimpressed with his work;
they
had
simply read the situation much better than him, with the coldness and
logic that he had yet to learn. His exposure might lead to his capture,
which in turn could lead to their being discovered. And so they had
created some distance. Shedding the emotive side of himself, the
human part, had shielded him from understanding the situation. He
understood that now. Any warmth or sympathy that existed within
him before his self-imposed exile had shrivelled and was as useless as
a vestigial organ or limb.

They had needed to aestivate that long-ago summer, they told him;
they could sense it would be a hot one. Despite his offerings, there
seemed to be no change in the Queen's condition and they decided
they must preserve their energies until the inevitable occurred. He was
to go into hiding for as long as it took. It had been hard for him to
comprehend. He had struck out in this direction, driven by an instinct
planted within him since birth, since
before
birth. He had killed nine
children on a spree that lasted three years. The media storm that
surrounded his activity did not impress him, nor his reputation as
Britain's most feared serial killer. He derived no pride from eluding
the police, no consternation that the newspapers wrongly accused
him of eating his prey. All that mattered to him was the means to an
end.

Thirty years on, that end was here, but not in the way he had
envisioned it.

He knew he must leave soon, because although She was dead, Her
replacement would need to be found. A return to strength was not out
of the question, but it could not happen while he was decaying in a
collapsed, forgotten barn. What was important was the quality of his
flesh, the commitment, the speed and efficiency of the kill. What
really mattered was how they read his dedication, his passion. He
must return.

He rose from the uncomfortable metal camp-bed with its thin
mattress and death-grey blanket. He walked the three paces to the
shattered door that separated him from the corridor.

He ran his hands through his hair, felt the soft stubble on his chin.

Long hair now, turning silver – he could see it if he pulled it in front
of his face. He would not cut it, although he shaved regularly,
religiously. He had not seen himself in a mirror for so long he had
begun to doubt that they had ever existed. Mirrors seemed too
fantastic to him to be true, like the technology they used to show on
Tomorrow's World.
He had forgotten what his own face looked like,
even as he traced the blunt blade of his straight-edge razor over its
planes and curves and runnels. Even if he could remember, it would
have changed beyond recognition now. Thirty years without being
able to stare into his own eyes, question himself about what he had
done with his life, demand some answers, some confirmation that he
was on the right track, no matter what. It was difficult to keep
focused when there was nothing to focus on any more.

What did he miss from normal life? Really, there wasn't that
much. A pint and a paper, the odd football match, a blow-job, a
curry, and the feel of a cricket ball in his hands. Once he had been a
fair cricket player, a bowler, able to swing the ball in or out
depending on the state of the wicket, the state of the ball, the
moisture in the air. Once he had been in love. Once he had thought
about fathering children, rather than eating them. Destiny ruined
your choices, ruined the notion that you ever really had any choices
in the first place.

The only thing that hurt him was wondering about his mother,
dead a long time now, but not so long that she didn't know her son
was a beast. Now and then it pinched him to imagine her holding him
as a newborn, kissing his forehead, wondering at the size of his
fingers, the softness of his skin. He would have been faultless in her
eyes. His laughter would have brought her to the edge of tears, his
simple look of need and love from his cot in the morning when he
wakened would have given her belief in God.

When did you become disappointed in your offspring? Was there
ever a time? When they grew obnoxious with teenage hormones,
defaced by acne? Or were you always in thrall to them despite the
way the dice fell? You sent them letters and cards professing love even
while their irritation with your parochial life threatened to choke
them. No detail, no matter how boring to them, was anything less
than fascinating to you.

Time, studied in this way, was of immense interest to him. There
was a poignancy in seeing the thrum of his heartbeat in the soft skin
of his wrist and remembering a moment when a girlfriend from his
teens pressed her tongue against the same spot after they had made
love. Looking at that pulse in his skin made him feel that no time had
passed between then and now. You grew older, but your memories
kept you young. You could always be a virgin if you wanted it.

He touched his fingers to his eyes; he felt the tender flesh, the
minuscule network of wrinkles and the way his tears filled it. He
thought of death and love and the way the two were so intertwined
that it was difficult to untangle them in his thoughts. He had killed
but he had loved, too. Did that make him a bad man?

Death. It was both an end and a beginning. Tears were just his way
of showing some respect.

He moved, as best his tired limbs would allow, to the part of the
corridor where the wall gave itself up to the sprawling forest. He
remembered a news programme he had listened to on the radio, not
long after going into hiding. One of the ten-a-penny psychologists
was talking about what Salavaria was really like, how a fiend like that
functioned, how he had slipped the widening net persistently over the
years. That he would never make eye contact because he must have
the kind of penetrative eyes that people remembered.

The psychologist said he must be a very lonely man. But Salavaria
had never felt that way. He felt separate. Intended. Chosen. Different.
He was a link between the past and the future.

Nonsense from these psychologists – a breed of repellent,
indecorous creatures who were regularly called upon to spout forth
over wars and TV reality shows – did not impinge on him. When
these so-called experts opened their mouths to speak, Salavaria sent
his mind elsewhere. He imagined the purse and slither of other
mouths as they talked their rot, and remembered the flavour of
Rhiannon Tate's freshly harvested kidneys, poached by the heat of
her fear. He remembered the softness of Lisa Kerwin's throat under
his fingers and the yield of her trachea, like a Styrofoam cup. He
remembered the almost supernatural sweetness of Debra Finnegan's
blood. He drank so much of it that his piss turned to treacle for days
after.

The forest both stretched out around him and muscled in on his
space. It was a paradox he loved. In many ways, he saw himself as the
forest. He was patience and frustration; ancient and modern; strength
and fragility. He had been here so long he had become a part of the
forest. And somewhere beyond it, things were in motion; there was a
way back, if he wanted it. He realised he did, very much.

The taste of hot meat. It would soon be back in his mouth, filling
his nostrils with copper. The special flavour and texture. For the first
time in three decades, he became impatient about having to wait.