The Killing Lessons (25 page)

‘Where are you?’ Liza Terrill said.

‘Fifty miles west of St George,’ Valerie said. ‘Utah.’

Eight hours had passed since her non-fight with Carla, and she’d spent all of them on the road. Now she sat in the Taurus in a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s parking lot with a cup of hot water and lemon that was too hot to drink, but the heat of which was soothing to her hands. The car’s clock said 3.46 a.m. Beyond the rest area and the highway’s lights open land yawned away into darkness. The night here was ragged cloud with patches of stars. Will Fraser had called four hours ago. Carla had been to see Deerholt again. She had witness statements – the security guard, the young mother, the shopping cart kid – testifying that Valerie had attacked her. She also had the bruises to prove it. Deerholt was, in Will’s words, fucking furious.

Since then hours and miles of waking dream behind the wheel. Her body ached. Her snot when she blew her raw nose was hot. Gooseflesh came and went, no matter what she did with the Taurus’s A/C. Her skin whispered, shrank, went heavy and cold. The sensations brought her childhood back. Fevers that took the details of her bedroom and warped them, turned her mattress to warm molasses, made sea-monsters of the carpet’s scrolls, set the curtains’ dark flowers free to move and morph. In childhood delirium was confirmation of the world-behind-the-world, the one imagination hinted was always there, waiting for its chance to come through. But in childhood (
her
childhood, she thought, not everyone’s, not fucking
Leon’s
) there were merciful intercessions: her mother’s cool hand on her forehead; her father carrying her to the bathroom when she was too weak to walk. These merciful intercessions stopped you falling once and for all into the world-behind-the-world. But when you were an adult, you were on your own.

Unless you had love.

‘What the hell are you doing in Utah?’ Liza said.

It refreshed the absurdity of what she
was
doing: driving around in case she ran into them.

She told Liza about the sighting.

‘Jesus, they could be anywhere,’ Liza said.

‘Not if she’s still alive,’ Valerie said. ‘If she’s still alive they’ll have brought her to HQ.’

‘Valerie, all you’ve got is a
state
.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘OK, OK, don’t get your pantyhose twisted. I’m calling to tell you we got the DNA from the purse sequins. It’s a match. It’s your boys. Or one of them.’

‘Great. Thanks. You’ll send it over to Will?’

‘No problem. How’s it going with Blasko?’

They had no secrets from each other. Valerie had told her about Nick’s return when she was up in Santa Cruz.

‘Fearfully,’ Valerie said. ‘Both of us. I’ve got to get this thing… If we start now…’

‘Don’t mix the two things up,’ Liza said.

Valerie didn’t need her to unpack that: Don’t make you and him depend on the case. The way you did before. The way you fucked it up.

‘I know you and your crazy Catholic genes,’ Liza said. ‘You think you don’t deserve it.’

‘I
don’t
deserve it,’ Valerie said.

‘OK, when you get back me and you are going to go out and drink ourselves stupid. And if you don’t go home and go to bed with him,
I’m
going to.’

‘All right,’ Valerie said. ‘That sounds fair.’

‘Listen, get back in one piece, will you?’

‘I will.’

‘And watch out for those Mormon motherfuckers.’

After she’d hung up, Valerie sat for a few moments blowing on her hot water and lemon. Again she pictured herself gone from all this, a woman sitting outside an adobe hut in pitiless sun, her bare feet in dust as red as chilli powder. Alone. At the same time felt the promise of the warmth and peace of lying in bed with Blasko. Love. Room for each other. A future.

And between her and either vision the whispering dead women. The child’s body with its text of wounds and invisible wings of darkness. The maddening inner hiss of Claudia Grey time, boiling away to nothing.

The division between Claudia’s hand and the metal in her pocket kept coming and going. One moment it was a thing in itself, the next it was part of her, an extension of the flesh and blood and bones in her fingers and palm. Her nerves ran ahead of her, rehearsing the second when she would lift her arm, swing it through the swarming space that separated them, trace the impossible arc that would end with the weapon buried in his eye socket. A ghost version of herself went through the movement, over and over, and each time it weakened her, as if the longer she waited the less likely it was that she’d be able to do it. Useless thoughts and images buzzed and fluttered: her first morning at school, her face pressed to the freezing bars of the playground gate as her mother turned and walked away; wading into the Indian Ocean one evening, the warm water soft and heavy around her bare legs; sitting in her room at Magdalen with a small-hours whisky and her battered
Middlemarch
, then looking up at her dark window to see that big flakes of snow were falling; getting off the Tube at Tottenham Court Road on a Friday evening, lonely and excited and alive to the mystery of another London night. There was a superabundance of these thoughts and memories, as if her life were making an effort to gather its whole self in her before she died.

And against all that was the reality of now, these minutes, these seconds, the fact of where she was, which, regardless of where she’d been or what she’d done in her twenty-six years, was the only thing that mattered.

They hadn’t spoken for a while. He’d stood there watching her, his hand massaging his cock through his jeans. His face was a fine balance of trance and mistrust. He was breathing through his mouth. She had to be careful. He was afraid of her voice. He was afraid of looking her in the eye. A degree of aversion was necessary. She was understanding the precarious nuances. If she did one thing wrong it would be over.

She undid the top two buttons of her jeans. It was sickening to have to use both hands. To let go of the roll of metal in her jacket pocket. Just two buttons. She could still run. Nothing would stop her being able to run. Another fine balance. Since she’d lifted her top and exposed her breasts a fresh layer of horror had settled on her. She was contradicting instinct at the cellular level. She was forcing herself into a transformation. At times, it felt as if she were simply going to pass out. The thought of running filled her legs with weakness.

He leaned the shotgun against the wall. Fumbled in his pocket.

The keys.

This was it.

Oh God. Oh God help me please.

She opened her mouth to say something, a final word of confirming encouragement – but stopped herself. She must do nothing. Just what she was doing. What she was doing was working. One word could break the spell. He was operating beyond what he knew. He was becoming a stranger to himself with every passing second.

He bent to put the key in the padlock. The basement packed its silence around the small sounds. Claudia wanted it to stop. It was too soon. She wasn’t ready. She would never be ready. She couldn’t. She didn’t have enough madness in her. You thought you were already maximally afraid – but it turned out there was more fear. It turned out your room for fear was infinite.

The keys scraped the floor. Jingled. The lock clicked.

There was no going back. There was no time. She couldn’t believe she’d brought this to herself. She couldn’t bear it. She knew if she screamed now she wouldn’t stop screaming. It was too late. It was a mistake. She couldn’t do what she had to do. She’d deceived herself.

She put her back against the wall’s bare brick. To stop herself from collapsing. The mental rehearsals were chaos now. She hadn’t, she saw with sickening clarity, thought through the details. He would walk up to her and smash his fist into her face. He would walk up to her and tear out a hank of her hair. He would walk up to her and rip her stomach open with the knife. In one of the optimistic (idiotic) visions she’d seen him lying on his back, her astride him. She’d seen herself having all the time in the world to plunge the metal accurately into his eye. She’d seen him with his eyes
closed
, not seeing it coming. Now she just saw his fist hurtling towards her face. Now she saw herself winded, on the floor, him kicking her, repeatedly, in her guts, her breasts, her face. Now she saw herself on her belly with her jeans and panties pulled down and his hand wrapped in her hair and the knife going leisurely into her flank.

All these permutations of her failure, her madness, her desperation, her stupidity.

The grille ascended with a violent rasp. A monster clearing its throat.

There was nothing between her and flight.

Except him.

Could she just run,
now
?

She could see in his face and shoulders he was thinking of pulling the cage down and locking it behind him.

But he didn’t. He was afraid of losing his momentum too. He didn’t know what he was doing. Only that he was moving forward into something new.

It was too late. Again. The seconds had betrayed her. He was in front of her. Less than two feet away. She could smell him. She had to stop the reflex in her right hand to go into her pocket for the metal tube.

His face was close. The blue eyes like archery targets, the absurd connection with Robin Hood again, him the snivelling traitor. The deep green of English forests. Her father saying: Do you know, Claudie, the whole of England was covered in trees, once, long ago.

Very slowly, disbelieving herself, she reached out and rested her hand, lightly, against the bulge in his jeans.

It detonated him. He lunged at her.

In the blur that followed all the images – of her family, of her past, of running – simply imploded. She’d imagined calculation. She’d imagined herself picking her moment. Instead there was just this. No time. Nothing. Everything.

But she felt his sour breath warm on her face and his fingernails digging into her breast and before she knew what she was doing her right hand was out of her pocket, the metal gripped in her wet fist.

It seemed an interminable time she held it there, raised alongside his head. The silence between them pressed on her with static urgency. The blood pounded in her skull. The open air beyond the house was a gravity, pulling her. The open air. Freedom. Life.

She drew her arm back. Her muscles said it was impossible. Everything said it was impossible.

It occurred to her – a remote, minor fact – that her right leg was between both of his. Every movie she’d ever seen in which a woman did this to a man. A boy she’d once seen in gym at school in Bournemouth; he’d been walking across the beam. Slipped. Took his full body weight on his balls. The entire class had erupted into laughter. But the boy had seemed to pause there for ever, legs scissored around the wood, before comedically turning upside down and dropping to the crash mat. After a few moments, he’d vomited, which had silenced everyone.

Claudia jerked her knee up as hard as she could.

She felt the breath rush out of him. Saw the extraordinary detail of his thin face with its mouth open and its roundel eyes wide. She felt his body scrambling to recover itself and failing, failing, failing. He bent forwards, would have collapsed to his knees if not for her, if not for the softness of her midriff cradling his head. The intimacy of this revolted her.

Blind, deafened, thudded against by the room’s crammed energy, she struck with the metal tube.

Nowhere near his eye. It smashed into the cartilage of his ear.

He made a strange, falsetto sound, as of very negligible protest.

She hit him again, vaguely aware that her grip was warm and moist with blood.

The blow felt weak, but at the same time she felt it gouge a small chunk of flesh from his skull.

In spite of which his hands were strong. The left gripped her lapel. The right raked its nails down her breast. He was realising. He was understanding that he was losing control. He was in disbelief. He shoved his head hard into her. He was trying not to go down on his knees. Claudia felt her body’s lights blazing. A city with an overload of electricity—

His hand shot up and grabbed her throat. The front of her throat. She felt his sharp-tipped fingers already tight and tightening on her trachea, her body’s oxygen warnings firing, starvation racing through her arteries. He was trying to make the dirty fingernails meet. He was trying to rip her throat out.

She drew her arm back – pictured, briefly, the tube’s vicious V-edge – then screamed and struck as hard as she could at his head.

He must have seen it. He must have read, through the blur of his pain, her intention. He turned his face away to protect his eyes.

The metal went an inch deep into the side of his gullet.

Nothing seemed to happen.

The two of them froze. To Claudia it was as if he were pausing to recalibrate, to get a grasp of the adjusted situation. His hand was still gripping her throat but she could feel his weight pulling him down. She knew that if she withdrew the weapon and tried to strike again she might miss. She was distracted by the extraordinary new sensation – of having stabbed someone, of her hand still tight around the rolled metal, of its astonishing entry into his flesh. With a curious precision of focus, she understood she had only a moment to do all the damage she could.

So instead of pulling the weapon out and trying for a second wound, she drove it with all her strength deeper into his throat.

‘Fuck,’ he gurgled, quietly, on the still indrawn breath. ‘Fuck.’

She let go of the metal and shoved him. Two seconds of resistance, then he sank away from her, his legs buckling under him, in slow motion. His hands dropped from her and went gently – tentative, confused exploration – towards the metal buried in his neck. The blue eyes blinked, delicately.

The second it took Claudia to get past him was filled with the imagined sensation of him reaching up and grabbing her ankle.

But it didn’t happen.

Instead the basement’s space opened to her. All her movements felt slow. She was aware of reaching up and yanking her top back down to cover her breasts. It was a minute, precious relief, a sudden integrity.

The shotgun was where he’d left it, propped against the wall. She grabbed it.

Kill him.

But the sound of the shot would bring the other one. Never held a gun of any kind in her entire life. The strange heaviness. The dark personality of the thing. The sound of the shot the sound of the shot the sound—

She felt herself raising it and turning and pointing it at him and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing the trigger.

Nothing happened. A nerve in her finger protested.

She was doing something wrong.

Safety.

There was something called a safety.

It was too much. She couldn’t think.
Look for it. Time. No time. Run.

Run
.

He’d found where the metal had gone into him. He was easing it out. The sight of him doing this – and of the blood that hurried out with it – snapped something in her. The bare fact of him still moving, still going about his animal business of trying to recover, his dirty fingernails and blinking eyelashes, was more than she could bear.

She turned the shotgun, gripped it by its barrels, hefted it to shoulder height – and smashed it down on his skull.