Transgressions (19 page)

It was the logic of that connection that scared her more than anything else. She walked quickly back into the house and locked the door behind her. Then she went into the cellar and found a large ball of garden twine. She used it to secure the lock to the handle, winding it around and around and around, until there was no room for manipulation, no sliver of space where a metal edge could get in and release the lock. Then she went out of the kitchen and locked the door, pushing a broom up against the handle and wedging it against the wall, so that even if the lock broke, the door would not open. From the hall she called the locksmith, then went upstairs to clean the study.

H
e arrived before she’d finished. When the doorbell rang she had gathered up the paper, relocating each sheet in its own order and language, scrubbed most of the ketchup stains from the walls, and was at work on the computer, painstakingly scraping globules of gunk from in between the keys.

This time she asked to see some kind of identification before she opened the door. He slid a card through the space left by the chain. It wasn’t the same man; this one was younger, with a broken nose and a bony face. She spent a long time checking his credentials.

“I asked for the man I had before,” she said, as she took the chain off the lock.

“He’s out on another job,” he replied, with an equal lack of charm. “This is my night off. They had to call me in special.”

“I don’t care. It was the other man I wanted.”

He shrugged. “Look, if you want to complain call the governor. You’ll still have to pay the call-out charge. If you want it done tonight it’s me or no one.”

She scowled and showed him down to the kitchen. It took her a while to unwedge the broom. He glanced at her strangely. “You had a burglar?” he asked, sounding supremely uninterested.

“You could call him that.”

At the French windows he screwed his nose up at the twine. “Is the lock broke?”

“No. It’s extra protection. They’re coming in through the cat flap, pushing something in and manipulating the lock.”

He looked at her as if she were mad. She did nothing to reassure him. “So, what d’you want me to do? Change the lock? Add another?”

“Both. And stick in some bolts at the top and bottom.”

He shrugged. “I’ve got nothing but time and it’s your money.”

As she sat and watched him the darkness thickened outside. He didn’t like her sitting there. It made him nervous. Well, it’s nice to have someone who’s more scared than I am, she thought, as she watched him sniffing, running a quick hand under his nose, apparently unembarrassed by his lack of a tissue.

If it was
him,
what would I do? she thought. If it was him in here now? I’d have to hit him with something. A plate, a saucepan. The kitchen knives were sitting in front of her in their block. Would I do that? she thought. Could I? Could I really pick up one of those and use it?

He glanced up and caught her eyes on the knife block. He gave her an edgy little smile. “You know, if you’re really worried about burglars, you could always call the police,” he muttered, as if it were something they had already been talking about.

“The police?” she said rather dreamily. “Yes. They’re such a help, aren’t they?”

He went back to the work even faster. An hour later, the door was transformed into something out of a cartoon, locks and bolts everywhere. He ran her through them all. Then she got out the poker and tested the ones at the top and bottom. They were a long way away from the cat flap.

He was already gathering his tools and heading for the exit. He made out the bill with the door open, was even about to pocket it before she’d given him her credit card.

“You better write down the number,” she said. “For all you know I could be a fraud.”

He glanced up at her. Not you, lady, she could hear him thinking, you’re too crazy for that. She liked the fact that he was scared of her. As he handed back her card she gave him a big, wild grin. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

With the front door locked up she now went back to the kitchen and once again tested all the locks. She pulled the bottle of brandy from the cupboard and poured herself a hefty slug. Then she took the portable phone from its hook and stationed it next to her at the table. She would have liked to listen to some music, felt the sense of someone else’s company around her, but the stereo could be heard in the garden and she didn’t want to put him off. When she felt ready she closed the kitchen door, came back to her seat, and switched off the light.

The dark jumped in around her. She waited, breathing deeply and evenly. Eventually black became gloom and she began to make out the shapes: the bread bin, the shelves, the frame of the French windows, and the intense live blackness beyond. She moved her chair back against the wall. From outside looking in you would not be able to make her out at all. After a while her pulse returned to its normal rate.

She had been sitting there for maybe half an hour when the phone rang. It cut through the silence like a knife flash out of darkness. She grabbed so fast that she missed and it fell to the floor where she had to scramble to find it, then peer and grope in the dark to get the right button.

“Hello,” said a man’s voice when she finally connected. “
I
thought you were out.”

“Who is this?” she asked harshly.

“It’s me, Malcolm? Remember? From last—”

“Malcolm. God. Malcolm.”

“Yeah. How are you?”

“Fine. Fine.”

“You . . . er . . . sound strange. What are you doing?”

Sitting in the dark waiting for a man, she thought. “Nothing. Just . . . just hanging out. How about you?”

“Oh, this and that. Listen . . . I, er . . . I’m sorry, but I left my watch there.”

“What?”

“My watch. I must have left it in your bedroom. I think on the bedside table.”

“Your watch?”

No doubt an analyst would have something to say about that particular memory lapse. But, then, that’s what they’re paid for. Given the embarrassed tone of his voice it seemed clear to her that it was just a watch. “Yes.”

“Oh. So what d’you want me to do. Do you want me to mail it to you?”

“Yeah. Or . . . or I could drop ’round and pick it up.”

“When?”

“I don’t know . . . I mean, I could come now. I’ve just finished at the office and—”

“No,” she said, louder than she intended. “No, not now. Not tonight. I’m . . . I’m busy.”

“I see. Well, then maybe you could stick it in the mail.”

She took down the address. As she wrote it she wondered if she was misjudging the conversation, if he was really saying something else. What would she think if he was? Hard to know. Things had moved so far since last night. She didn’t feel like the same person at all. “I’ll make sure I do it tomorrow.”

“Thanks.” Pause. “Are you all right?”

“As well as can be expected under the circumstances,” she said, laughing, before she had had time to think about it. He laughed back, but a little uncomfortably. This time the pause was a silence. “Sorry,” she added abruptly. “I’m . . . I’m a bit tired.”

“Yeah, me, too. Okay, well . . . listen, I’ll see you around, then.”

“Yes. See you around.”

The line clicked and she put the phone back on the table. She reran the conversation in her head. He would think she was weird. Add him to the list. Maybe she should call him back, tell him her problem, and ask him to come over and save her. Slay the dragon and win the maiden. Isn’t that how it used to work? Whatever happened to chivalry? Did they lose the habit, or did we give it up with our virginity? Poor Malcolm, she thought, he’d probably be as scared of this as I am.

She looked at her watch in the gloom. Nine-thirty. She sat and waited some more. It was still too early. But she had all night and he would come. She was sure of it. Time passed. She thought of Jake sitting by the phone, his nerves eaten by fear, waiting. Waiting. His call would be different from hers. They wouldn’t even want money. Just to flay him alive a little with the sound of her voice. And make sure the shipment that was on its way got a clean bill of health. He had already called off the tail on the men fingered by the antiques dealer. He knew he was defeated the minute the car had pulled away, knew he’d give them anything they wanted. Swallow the fury and hold it later for revenge. “When do I get her back?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll see her tomorrow morning.”

The box with its bloody little contents wrapped in tissue was on his doorstep at six a.m. The blood had dried fast to the paper; he had to pull it off. It was stubby and cold to the touch. It looked absurd more than horrific, the flesh waxy and stiff, almost like some kind of joke marzipan fruit. Why was it always fingers? Fingers or ears. Maybe they were the only amputations you could do without a doctor present. After all, you wouldn’t want them to die from loss of blood.

Was that her talking or the book? She tossed her head to get rid of the thought, and, as she did so, across the darkened kitchen the cat flap snapped open. She turned her head in time to see a dark shape moving its way across the floor. Not so much intruding as needing a way to the food pellets. She let out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

Millie took her time at the water bowl, the sound of her lick-lapping unnervingly loud in the stillness. Then, when she had had enough, she jumped up onto her mistress’s lap, stretching herself out under one hand, nuzzling into it, demanding to be caressed.

She obliged, glad of the warmth and the company. They sat together as the night deepened. Come now, she thought. I’m ready for you now. Ready to watch from the shadows as your stretched coat hanger fails to gain you entrance and you realize too late that you’ve been busted. Then watch as you creep back across the gardens to a house where one particular window will light up and I will know which address to give to the police. Or maybe I wouldn’t even bother. Maybe I would simply track you down myself, enact my own revenge like the avenging angel of my fantasies. What would she do? How would it feel? The thought excited and terrified at the same time. She let it go.

Time passed, and after a while she stopped thinking, growing still in the rhythm of the night silence, waiting now as if she could wait forever. Eleven, twelve, one, two. The French windows and the cat flap stayed closed.

A
t two-thirty she began to feel suddenly sleepy, her body stiff from being in one place too long, her mind numb with the quiet.

She got up and walked to the window, peering out into the gloom. The garden was empty. There was nobody out there, she was sure. So she had been wrong. He would not come tonight. Of course, in some ways it made more sense for him to wait. Let her stew in her own fear a little longer. There was no point in driving herself even madder through lack of sleep. She checked that all the locks and bolts were in place and, locking the kitchen door behind her, she went up to bed.

thirteen

S
he never knew what woke her up, never could work out if it was an actual sound or some subliminal reverberation of terror breaking in through the layers of dreams. All she knew was that suddenly she was out of sleep and wide-awake, eyes open, mind alert, with no sense of the journey from the unconscious to the conscious, no residual grogginess at all.

She was lying curled to one side, her head facing the entrance to the room. The flickering digital clock told her it was 4:10 a.m. She lay still, her eyes acclimatizing to the darkness until at last she could make out the shape of the bedroom door, half open. And as soon as she saw it she knew something was very wrong.

She was instantly rigid with fear, as if everything in her life that she had ever been afraid of was, at this moment, gathered together and tapping at the window of her brain. She lay exactly where she was, not moving a muscle, not even allowing herself to blink. She tried to breathe normally, but the action seemed to hurt her chest. What is it? she thought frantically. What is it you can feel?

The answer came from her ears rather than her mind; somewhere in the room behind her she registered the sound of a long release of breath, so steady, so controlled, that there was almost a sweetness in the sigh. Millie, she thought immediately, the fog of fear lifting a fraction, giving her back her wits. Millie sleeping too close. She waited for what felt like an age. But when it came the next time there was no mistaking it. The sound was too loud, too nasal, for Millie, the exhalation too drawn out, as if the breath were being released through the mouth rather than the nose. Not animal but human and coming from close by.

Her mind rejected what it couldn’t handle. It wasn’t possible. How could anyone have broken in through those locks? This was her imagination playing truant from reason, scaring her as it had scared her that night when she had followed him up the stairs only to find the landing empty of everything but her fear. Learn from that. Only confront it and it will, once again, disperse like smoke.

She swallowed once, twice, then, slowly, with a languor that might have been read as sleep but was more the semi paralysis of terror, she shifted her body over from the curled position until she was lying on her back. And so it was that as her feet moved farther down the bed they encountered an obstacle at the bottom, too heavy and too firm to ever be the body of a cat. And this time she knew that the nightmare was real.