Transgressions (27 page)

She counted the house numbers off carefully. From her kitchen window she could see what she thought was the left-hand end of the terrace, though not the right. If she had got it correct his was eighteenth along. That made it number 36 or possibly 38.

Neither of them was in particularly good shape, but 38 was definitely the loser, its bottom window frames peeling and the door splintered at one corner with cracked frosted glass in the panels. She crossed the road and climbed the steps to the front door. There were two bells, but no names. Neither bell looked as if it worked. She pressed the bottom one. There was a thin sound from deep inside somewhere. Silence. Then footsteps.

The door opened onto a corridor cluttered with decorators’ ladders and drop cloths. A woman, young, in jeans and a sweater, stood with a baby on her arm.

She flashed back to the night she had focused on a certain lighted window in her binoculars. Wrong house. Again. “Hi. I’m sorry. I was looking for a man who I thought lived here. Tall, thin—wiry hair? I was sure he told me number thirty-eight.”

“No. Sorry. There’s only the Cranwright family here,” she said in a giveaway accent made up of the Outback and surfing beaches: sunshine vowels in winter gloom. “They just moved in a few months ago though, so maybe he was here before.”

“I see. You don’t know about next door, by any chance? I mean, it could have been thirty-six.”

She shrugged. “I’m the nanny. I don’t live here. But I think they’re apartments. I’ve occasionally seen folk coming in or out.”

She was nice-looking, with a no-nonsense haircut and the leftovers of a tan. Fresh off the boat. Had they told her about English cities? How dark they could be? How you had to lock the windows and check the footsteps behind you in alleyways? Maybe he wouldn’t be so foolish as to crap in his own backyard. More the kind of guy who preferred crossing walls and darkened gardens. “Thanks anyway,” she said quietly.

“No worries.”

Let’s hope so. She walked back across the road and checked out number 36. Now that she knew, the house looked even more appropriate. The bottom floor had a graying lace curtain with a forest of jungly plants pushed up against the glass. It would be dark inside, though hardly tropical. The middle floor—his floor—had blinds: not thin fashionable ones, but chunky wood, a leftover from an obsession with Scandinavian furniture thirty years before. Her mother’s sister had had them in her living room. As a child she remembered running her fingers along them during bored Sunday afternoons, harvesting rich layers of dust. Now they were a sure sign of furnished accommodation.

Furnished accommodation. She had done it only once, a stopgap between a friend’s apartment and one of her own, and she had hated it even then: hard enough to know who you are in life without trying to find out among other people’s obsessions. She couldn’t wait to leave. No doubt he felt the same way. And the nights, of course, would be the worst. If you were going to feel the madness you’d feel it most then.

Hmmn, I know you quite well, she thought. Your scrawny body, your zipped lips, and your nasty little hammer and twine. She saw again that wired, nervous smile. What did he want from her? Some kind of understanding, even sympathy? Forget it. Inadequate is as inadequate does. I bet you’re in there now, she thought, cutting out headlines from the local newspaper and sticking them in your scrapbook. Getting a life, it was called. Except his came from destroying other people’s.

Not anymore. She used the phone booth at the end of the road, getting the number from directory assistance: it seemed too risky to call the emergency number.

A man answered. When she told him what her business was he said he’d put her through to the right person and asked her what her name was. When she wouldn’t give it he connected her anyway. Another voice answered. “Detective Inspector Groves, CID, speaking.”

“Are you the officer dealing with the Holloway Hammer?”

“I am on the investigation team, yes. Who am I speaking to, please?”

A familiar grammatical mistake, the kind of thing a translator comes across all the time. She took a deep breath. “The man you’re looking for lives at number thirty-six Montague Crescent. Middle bell.”

“Thirty-six Montague Crescent,” he repeated slowly. “I see. And can I ask you how you know?”

“I just know, that’s all.”

“Do you have a name for this man?”

“No.”

He paused. “You know, if you have anything to say—anything at all with regard to this case—I can guarantee you it would be kept in strictest confidence.” His voice was careful, almost rehearsed, almost—dare one say it?—a little bored.

“I’ve told you. He lives at thirty-six Montague Crescent. More than likely he’s there now.”

“Yes, madam. And I assure you that we will check it out. But I have to tell you we get, on average, two or three calls like this every day, and we obviously have to prioritize some of them. Now, if you felt able to give us your—”

Could they be tracing the call? she thought. They do that kind of thing, don’t they? Keep you on the end of the line until they have a reading.

“He carries a hammer and sometimes string or a piece of twine, okay? He’s tall and scrawny with a breathy voice. And he likes to talk before he does it, likes to see people scared. I’m sure any of your eight other women would tell you the same thing. Believe me, this is not a hoax.”

She slammed down the phone, heart thumping.

B
y the time she got home, the frozen foods were melting. She kicked aside the mail and slammed the boxes into the freezer. In the kitchen she made herself a strong cup of coffee. No point in trying to go to bed now. The adrenaline was too strong in her system. She imagined standing on the opposite side of his road, watching while they pulled him down the stairs into a waiting police car. No,
that
would be a dream worth going to sleep for. The reality, of course, would take awhile longer. An anonymous phone call would no doubt find itself added to a list. Maybe it would warrant some checking out. How long? One hour, maybe two. Never mind. While they worked so would she.

Back in the basement cell she went for action over elegance, writing to fit her mood. She made Mirka pathetic, then sweet, then in so much pain that she was unable even to cut up her own food.

 

The man did it for her, sitting next to her, hacking through the lump of gristly meat with a knife that was sharper than it looked. As she chewed slowly she tempted him into talk: tales of village life and how it had changed since the system had imploded, of poverty and disillusionment and the upsurge in new opportunities. She was surprised by how stupid he was, expecting the thin one to be the brains for the fat one’s brawn. But it made it easier.

In return she painted pictures of bright lights, big business, and sidewalks paved with gold, and watched as his eyes shone in their reflection. Expecting bribery (Would that have worked better? Was it really just greed?), he didn’t anticipate seduction, didn’t consciously register the heat of her against his leg or the way that her lips grew moist around the fork, until it was too late. And so it was that at last Mirka came to learn what it felt like to rub herself up against a country boy and find his farm fingers groping their way into the wetlands of her cunt.

The words flowed like genital juices. But still she made Mirka work at it, made her use the slap-slurp sound of sex and her own extravagant groans to cover up the scrape of the knife as she slid it up from the steel tray beside the bed. And she made her suffer, too, using her damaged hand to massage his cock (she needed her good one for the knife), the pain of the grasp roaring up through her like a lava flow and causing a yelp of breath that would have given her away if he hadn’t been too far gone to notice.

 

The playboy pleasures of American sex. They’d both seen enough of it in the movies, but she was the one who had been there, done that. Give the boys what they think they want and for that moment they’ll forget to be wary of you. She pushed him gently back onto the bed, sliding herself down his body onto her knees in front of him, using her tongue as a tourist guide, heading toward places he had read about in the brochures. He gasped, then pushed her head down farther toward his groin, and she knew then that she had him, and that his lust was wrenching him out of his own control.

As her tongue went down, so her good hand came up until the two connected in a triangle of soft flesh just above his penis. No time for thought now. She rammed the knife in, then twisted it up, feeling the steel push through a pulpy mash of sinew and flesh. And as she did so she rose up and covered his mouth with her own, sucking the scream out of him, taking its noise into her lungs and swallowing it down.

In that split second as he flung her off him in agony she was up and out the door, slamming it behind her and ramming the bolts into place.

The wood muffled his yells, but they would still be enough to wake the fat man. She went for what she could get. A heavy iron kettle was sitting near a gas ring on the floor. She picked it up and swung it down over his head with all the force she could muster. The blow connected; she could feel the mash of bone and metal, but in her gut she knew it wasn’t hard enough. He roared up, reaching out for her and clutching his head at the same time. She dropped the kettle and fled, up the cellar steps and out through the door. She heard him stumbling up behind her. This lock was flimsier; it would give with the first battering ram of his shoulder, but if there was any justice in the world she wouldn’t be there by then.

She peered frantically into the semidarkness of an empty room, all shadows and flagstones in the twilight. The place reeked of damp and decay: too much weather coming in around rotting window frames. No wonder there had been no worry about her screams. The house was a ruin.

Behind her the cellar door shook with the weight of his body. She sprinted out into a passageway and then into another smaller room with an old iron range under a chimney and a door giving out onto what must be the outside. It was locked. As she rattled the lock desperately, she heard something behind her. She whirled around in time to see a bulky shadow leap, crouching into the doorway; no face, no body, just a shape with arms thrust out in front of it in a gesture that echoed back through a million movies.

“Don’t sh—” she screamed, but the sound never got out of her mouth as the room exploded into fire all around her.

She was typing so fast the letters were coming out mangled. When she stopped to read it back she realized she was grinning, a silly cracked smile stapled to her face, held on so tight that it made her muscles ache. Stupid. Total crap—all of it, knee-jerk stuff without an ounce of finesse or originality. Except who cares as long as it does the trick? Once you stopped talking there was nowhere to go but action. In the cinema you’d be starting to feel the communal adrenaline now, little ripples of nervous approval and fun. The fact that it wasn’t good enough was somehow the point; its very crudeness was its satisfaction.

She highlighted the new text and printed it out, then pressed the save button. She could always rewrite it later.

She looked at her watch: 2:55
P.M.
Almost two hours since she had called. God, she’d like to see his face when he opened the door.

Well, why not? It was Christmas, after all. Everyone deserves at least one present, even if she might have to wait for it.

She decided to treat it like an outing. She pulled a loaf of bread out of one of the shopping bags and hacked off some clumsy slices, making crude sandwiches with a doorstop of cheese and a thick layer of mayonnaise, devouring half of them as she went, realizing only as she tasted the food how hungry she was. She dug out a couple of packets of chips and used the new coffee to make a thermos full. It looked like a builder’s lunch. She grabbed the printed manuscript and shoved it all in a plastic bag, along with a handful of tapes, and headed to the car.

Outside the temperature was dropping rapidly, an icy wind whipping late leaves through the gutter and across the roads. She drove to his street and parked the car facing away from his house on the opposite side, but with the winged mirror positioned so she could see his door and the road in front of it. She turned the engine off, but within half an hour had to switch it back on again to cope with the cold. She sat, eyes on the mirror, roasted air rising up all around her, and watched while a succession of women returned home with last-minute Christmas shopping, trailing children grown grumpy with the cold. The next-door nanny bounced a stroller carefully down the outside steps. The baby, stuffed into a padded one-piece ski suit with gloves and hood, jiggled about, yelling at the top of his lungs.

Fresh air. It could be a killer. But she was beginning to feel the need for it herself. The recycled heat from the engine was making her increasingly drowsy. If she just put her head back and closed her eyes . . . But she couldn’t give in to it now. There would be time enough to sleep later, safe and sound in the knowledge that this time there could be nobody to disturb her. She turned the engine off and let the cold wake her up.

By four-thirty it was dark. She watched as a man and his young son carried an oversized Christmas tree up the stairs to their house. The door opened onto a hall crammed with decorations, then closed again behind them. It looked warm in there.