The Book of You: A Novel (7 page)

Tuesday

C
LARISSA WAS WAITING
for the train to start its journey from Bath when Robert stepped on, only just making it before the doors locked, but he didn’t look as if he’d rushed. She was in the aisle seat, and watched him walk toward her, thinking how rare it was for someone to move so sure-footedly in a lurching carriage.

The seat across the aisle from her was empty. He took it and smiled good morning over the narrow passage. “Fancy seeing you here,” he said. “Going anywhere interesting?”

She affected a mysterious appearance. “Maybe.”

“On your way to work, perhaps?”

“I thought I’d skip work today. Just a whim. In fact, I’ve decided to skip it for the next six weeks.”

“So have I,” he said.

“What a coincidence,” she said.

“But seriously.” He stretched his long legs into the aisle, relaxed but alert; she knew he’d move them out of the way if anyone needed to pass, before they needed to ask. “You know I’m a fireman. Am I right in thinking you’re an academic? I heard you telling Annie you worked at the university.”

She shook her head, as if shocked and horrified by the idea. “I nearly was, but no. I’m an administrator.” She paused. “My father—he wanted me to be an academic. He was a schoolteacher. He taught English before he retired.” She laughed at herself. “It’s too early in the morning for true confessions.”

“Never too early for that. But I’m interested in why you changed your chosen path so dramatically.” He appeared to be mulling it over. “Every time I see you you’re reading. Or writing.”

She nodded. “Academics never escape work. Nights . . . weekends . . . There are always essays to mark, or articles to write, or research papers to read, or forms to fill in, or students to email. Not to mention the teaching and meetings. It’s unremitting. Some people love that life, but the idea of it made me feel trapped. I wanted to leave work behind at the end of the day when I went home. And I wanted my imaginative life to be my own—I didn’t want to have to account for it to other people.” She bit her lip, surprised to find herself telling him this. “So I abandoned my PhD.”

“What was it about?”

“How Pre-Raphaelite painters responded to Romantic poetry. Henry—my ex-partner—thought the Pre-Raphaelites were absurd. He was probably right, but I can’t help but love them.”

“Did you and Henry like any of the same poets?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Henry made me fall in love with Yeats.” She didn’t say that Henry used to whisper whole verses of Yeats to her in bed.

“You don’t strike me as someone who gives up on things.”

She didn’t want to bore him with the story of her father’s heart bypass in her second year of the PhD, and how the research seemed meaningless after she helped her mother to nurse him. But she knew her father’s close brush with death only hastened an inevitable admission that she wasn’t cut out for a life of abstraction and sterility, of thinking endlessly about other people’s ideas and words in an alien language; academic conferences and journals just made her head hurt. She’d rather look at the paintings and read the poems than theorize about them. And she needed to use her hands, to make things herself.

“Those Pre-Raphaelites did paint some beautiful dresses,” she said, “and fabrics. I like to sew, you see. So I was spending all my time re-creating those dresses instead of writing my PhD thesis.”

“I can see the temptation,” he said, making her laugh. “You should have done a PhD in textiles instead. Is there such a thing?”

“Probably. I think you can get one in pretty much anything these days.”

“The history of the fire engine?”

“Almost certainly,” she said. “But that’s not good as a facetious example—that’s actually something important.”

The train had arrived in Bristol. His dark-blue backpack was on the floor in front of him. It appeared huge and heavy, but he lifted it with one hand as if it contained nothing more than feathers, and the two of them made their way out.

Just past the ticket gates was a man dressed as a chicken. Thinking of the addict on the bridge, Clarissa dropped a worn and slightly torn five-pound note into his cup. It was all the cash she had. But Robert added five more.

M
R
. T
OURVILLE WAS
red-faced and portly. His wig was crooked and seemed about to slide off as he wiped his brow. Doleman’s pale eyes were glued to the back of his would-be savior, who was passing around a newspaper clipping.

Carlotta Lockyer was sitting on dandelion-covered grass that matched her eyes. She was wearing faded bell-bottom jeans, trainers, and a floaty purple blouse. Her blond hair was loose, skimming her shoulders, pushed behind her ears. Her pretty chin was tucked toward her chest as she looked up at the camera. Squinting in the soft spring sunshine and frowning slightly, she was sad and brave at once, as if newly serious after a sobering close call—not the image Clarissa would have thought Mr. Tourville wanted to publicize.

She took in the headline—
Young Woman’s Escape from Evil Sex Murderer.

She scanned for the date—nearly three years ago, in late April.

She read the caption beneath the photo—
Carlotta Lockyer, above, was nearly Randolph Mowbray’s victim.

Then she began the article itself.

Party girl Carlotta Lockyer only narrowly avoided the fate of Rachel Hervey, 19, who was murdered last August by deranged sex beast Randolph Mowbray, 26. Pretty Carlotta, 25, met the sadistic rapist and killer at a London nightclub. She admits that she found the calculating, vain, and devious Mowbray charming. “It embarrasses and terrifies me when I think how easily I agreed to visit him, but I got ill at the last minute and couldn’t go. I learned afterward that that was the weekend he killed that girl. It could have been me.”

Mowbray, who was writing a PhD thesis about serial killers in literature, had been obsessed with Rachel for several months before he raped, tortured, and strangled her. He then hid her body under the floorboards of his house, where it lay undiscovered for ten days. The English undergraduate’s disappearance sparked a national search and a televised reconstruction of her last known movements. During the five-week trial, the family’s harrowing ordeal was made worse by Mowbray’s wholly false allegation that Rachel had sought him out for a consensual kinky sex game that he claimed had then gone wrong and led to her accidental death.

Detective Superintendent Ian Mathieson described the case as “one of the most horrific and tragic things I’ve ever had to deal with in a 35-year career. The life of a talented and beautiful young woman was viciously stolen by Mowbray’s particularly brutal and distressing crime. Rachel’s last moments were of darkness and terror and pain.”

“M
ISS
L
OCKYER’S A
trouble magnet,” Annie whispered.

Clarissa nodded, though she hardly heard Annie. She remembered reading about the case at the time. There’d been something in Mowbray’s trial about how Rachel had complained to the police about him a few weeks before she went missing, but she didn’t have enough evidence for them to do anything.

Darkness and terror and pain.

She wanted to cry. She was picturing Rachel’s bruised and bloodied body beneath floorboards, her parents frantic, praying against hope for her safe return.

Mr. Tourville glared at Miss Lockyer. “You sold your story and your picture to a national newspaper.”

“They didn’t pay me a penny. I came
that close
”—she pinched her thumb and index finger together to demonstrate—“to that boy murdering me.”

“You exploited the tragic rape and murder of Rachel Hervey in order to feed your love of attention.”

“I never wanted that sort of attention. I hated the way they wrote about me. It wasn’t fair. They twisted everything.”

“You say you’d been raped. The other men were in the next room while this was supposedly happening. Why didn’t you scream for help? Fight back?”

“They were holding me down. Doleman threatened me with a knife. And the other men were hardly likely to come to my rescue, were they?”

“Please. You know there was no knife. You asked for it. You were lying back and enjoying it.” His delivery was so crude and venomous Clarissa couldn’t quite believe what she’d heard.

“No.” It was sob more than language.

Mr. Tourville returned Miss Lockyer’s outraged stare without flinching, puffing up his chest and setting his weight more squarely on his feet, as if he had just said something very brave when nobody else had dared.

S
HE COULD HEAR
Rafe’s voice, playing over and over again in her head, as she sat in the waiting room.
You were crazy with passion for me, Clarissa. You were out of control, the way you responded, the things you begged me to do to you. You wanted me. You were lying back and enjoying it.

“Clarissa?” She felt a light touch on her shoulder and looked up at Annie. “Time to go home.” The others were rising to follow the usher downstairs. It was only two thirty, but they were being let out early so the judge could conduct court business.

Robert peered at her. “You don’t look well. Are you well?”

“Fine.” She tried to smile. “Just sleepy.”

“Take a long walk this afternoon,” he said. “Get some fresh air. We don’t get many chances for that these days.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think I will.”

Tuesday, February 10, 4:30 p.m.

I dump my things in my flat as soon as I’m back. Quickly, I pull on two pairs of wool socks and my wellies. I walk straight out the door again, still bundled in my coat and hat and mittens.

I can’t help but check up and down my street. There is no sign of you anywhere, which is just as it should be. I happen to know you’re trapped in London at a postgraduate English conference—it’s one of the perks of my job that Gary had me book you into it.

I need to be in a place I can think, one of the places I love best. I need to pretend that killers only torture women and hide their bodies beneath floorboards in the newspapers. Not in real life. I need to pretend that it is normal to go for a walk in the late afternoon, even if the sky is already starting to darken. If I pretend all of this hard enough, it might become true.

I walk as briskly as I dare on the icy pavements until I reach the park.

The park is round. I think of it as a giant watch face. The black iron gates marking the main entrance are in the six o’clock position. I go through them and move clockwise, in the direction of nine o’clock, keeping to the road that rims the park’s circumference. I always imagine the clock’s twelve numbers spaced along this road, and measure my location against them at any given point. The road encircles the huge island of grass at the park’s center. The grass is covered thickly in snow, too difficult to trudge through.

I have reached eight o’clock. To my left is the path along the cliff. Below it is a steeply sloping forest and my favorite view of Bath. The Abbey will soon be bathed in blue light.

They have gritted the road, so I can move quickly, enjoying my blood pumping and the quiet wind in my face. It is peaceful here, unearthly in the twilight. A child would think the mound of snow-coated grass was an enchanted realm. All I can hear is the crunch, crunch, crunch of my boots on dry sticks. The park seems to be my private garden; the cold is keeping everyone else indoors.

I am at twelve o’clock, halfway around, as far away from the park entrance as I can be. In the empty children’s playground, a swing creaks gently, as if pushed by a ghost.

That is when you appear.

“Hello, Clarissa.”

I am completely frozen.

“I wasn’t feeling well. I had to give the conference a miss.”

For several seconds I forget to breathe.

“I said I wasn’t feeling well, Clarissa. Don’t you care? Aren’t you concerned?”

I put my hands on my ears and press hard to make myself think.

“You disappoint me.” You shake your head sadly. “I stopped by your house. But I saw you walking toward the park.”

You must be so skilled at following, close enough to keep me in sight without my guessing you are there. I had no idea. I didn’t see. I didn’t hear.

“I thought I’d lost you for a minute. You disappeared, but I found you.”

You always find me. Always. When do you ever not find me? And this time it’s my fault. All mine. All because I gave in to that stupid impulse not to let my fear of you imprison me.

Reclaim the night.
That idea was so important to me and Rowena when we were at university. We went on marches, thinking of the women who did that in the 1970s. We were wrong. They were wrong. It’s not even night yet, but it soon will be, and I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have tried to disregard that fear of dark places. I must never let myself disregard that fear again.

I consider leaving the road to cut in a straight line across the disc of grass, the most direct way out, but it’s a ridiculous idea. The snowdrifts are too high—it will take forever—and there are too many trees and bushes, casting their shadows. I will not let myself be lured from the path like Little Red Riding Hood. I understand all too well the lessons those stories teach.

“My car’s parked over there.” Out of the corner of my eye I see you gesture toward three o’clock. “I can give you a lift.”

The proposal is so absurd I ought to laugh, except that I’m growing way too dizzy to find it funny.

“I’m trying to be nice after yesterday, Clarissa. After all the days. After all of your insults and slights. But you don’t make it easy.”

Just leave me alone. That’s all I want from you.

Did you not hear me say that?

“I need you to tell me that you forgive me for what I said yesterday, Clarissa. You know I didn’t mean it, calling you that. I was angry. And you were very provoking.”

I will never forgive you.

What about that? Clearly that didn’t go in either. Which is why the leaflets are right, and speaking to you—even a tiny bit—is absolutely the wrong thing to do.