The Yeare's Midnight (39 page)

He tried to read the article that he had already read ten times at the station over the previous week. But his eyes failed him and he drifted away again, drugs lapping at his consciousness like waves on a lonely shore. Underwood dreamed he was walking with his parents on a pebbled beach. He threw pebbles into the sea, watching them skim across the waves. None of them sank into the water. They bounced over the wave tops until they faded out of sight, over the horizon. He looked at the pebble in his hand. It was an eye.

Dexter lay half-asleep in bloody exhaustion. She had loosened the bindings slightly but at a cost. Her wrists bled painfully and she felt no closer to manoeuvring herself free. She had been in the darkness for what seemed like hours. No one had come for her. Had the killer left her in the basement of a deserted house to rot and starve to death in the dark? The thought terrified her. A blow to the head would end things quickly. She would prefer that. She was brave, always had been. Crying alone and soundlessly
in the dark terrified her. It was the terror of waiting to be born.

Heather Stussman took a taxi from Southwell College to Cambridge Station, then boarded a local train to New Bolden. She was alone.

Crowan Frayne had watched Stussman board the train and had then driven at high speed, but within the speed limits, to New Bolden station. He beat her train there by five minutes. Stussman stepped out into the unfamiliar environment of New Bolden and immediately climbed into a minicab. Frayne followed at a distance, two cars back. He knew that she would be expecting him. No other cars appeared to be following her. Perhaps she would go through with it. He dared to dream.

Once he was confident she was heading for the cemetery, Crowan Frayne accelerated past the minicab. He knew a short cut and found a quiet place to park his van. Following Stussman from Cambridge meant that he hadn’t checked the cemetery. He would do that now.

Stussman climbed from her minicab at the main entrance to the cemetery. She shivered in the dry cold of the gathering darkness. The driver had told her that the war memorial was in the centre of the site, a two-minute walk from the road. The red lights of the car flared briefly at her as the minicab braked, turned right along Station Road and disappeared. She was alone. She felt the cold steel of the carving knife in her coat pocket and walked through the cast-iron gates into New Bolden Cemetery.

There was a path lined with imitation gas lamps that led into the heart of the graveyard. Stussman stepped briskly along the hazy yellow trail, her shoes crunching the gravel underfoot. It seemed to stretch endlessly into the darkness: there were black outlines of headstones all around that seemed to lean towards her, throwing strangely shaped shadows against the murmuring
grass: angels and carved flowers, open Bibles and crosses. The wind moved silently through the naked trees and chilled stone. She looked behind her and ahead. She could see nobody. Fear pricked at her skin, together with the crisp air. He was out there, moving with her like a shadow in the textured blackness. She was illuminated like a good soul in hell.

The war memorial loomed suddenly. Stussman’s heart hammered at her chest. She would give him five minutes. A train rattled and moaned in the near distance. She stood with her back against the cold marble of the monolith, felt the carved names of the dead press into her back. It was disrespectful, but at least it meant that no one could creep up behind her. If he came at her it would be from the front or the sides and she would have a second or two to draw the knife from her pocket.

She knew that she had to be mad. Corning to this place was a terrible mistake. She checked her watch: 5.15. Johnson would call the police in forty-five minutes if she didn’t call. It seemed like a long time now. She could be fifteen or twenty miles away in forty-five minutes. What would she do if he appeared? She hadn’t really constructed much of a strategy except self-defence. Stussman suspected that the killer might be suicidal and she hoped she could play to that if they started a discussion – encourage him, even.

‘Good evening, Dr Stussman.’

The voice came from directly in front of her. Out of the darkness. Heather Stussman jumped in terror and gripped the handle of the carving knife in her pocket. As she tried desperately to make out a face or a form, she half withdrew the knife in case he ran at her.

‘Who’s there?’ she said. It sounded pathetic, reedy and shrill in the vast openness of the cemetery.

‘I think you know,’ the voice said.

‘What should I call you?’

‘Nothing.’

Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark. She thought she could make out a figure, straight ahead of her in the shadows. He was clever. He had chosen this spot carefully and deliberately. The same lights that illuminated her and the war
memorial blinded Heather Stussman to the area beyond the pathway.

‘I am alone,’ she said.

‘So it seems,’ said Crowan Frayne. ‘Who did you tell? Not the police.’

‘I haven’t told anyone where I am. However, I have left a sealed envelope at Southwell College. It contains details of the arrangements for our meeting. It will be opened if I do not call in during the next half an hour.’

‘Very resourceful of you.’ Crowan Frayne stepped from the shadows onto the pathway. She could see him now: tall and lean, silhouetted. A hole in the night.

‘Where is Sergeant Dexter?’

‘Safe.’ He didn’t move.

‘I want to see her.’

‘You will.’

Heather Stussman shivered. There was a terrible calm about the man.

‘I would like you to come with me.’

‘Where to?’

‘There is a grave plot some twenty metres from here. I would like you to see it.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s important. Step out onto the pathway and walk. Please.’

‘You’re going to kill me.’

‘If you don’t do as I say, I surely will.’

Stussman stepped away from the war memorial and onto the gravel pathway. The killer stood some two metres from her now. She could see his face more clearly: thin and gaunt, gouged with deep lines of sadness. His eyes appeared black – as if they weren’t there. He gestured to her to start walking. He stayed a couple of paces behind. Stussman kept her right hand in her pocket.

‘Let me guess,’ said Crowan Frayne from behind her. ‘A screwdriver or a Southwell College cheese knife?’

She cursed quietly. She could hear him smiling. ‘It’s a carving knife and if you screw with me I will stick it into your dick.’

‘That won’t be necessary. Turn left here.’

They had arrived where two pathways crossed. Stussman did exactly as she was told. There was a cluster of small gravestones to her right. They had walked about ten yards when she heard Frayne step off the gravel. She stopped and looked around. He was standing looking down at a grave.
So,
Stussman thought,
you
have
lost
someone
and
now
you
want
to
join
them.
How could she use that to her advantage? She took a step towards him.

‘Someone who was close to you?’ she asked softly.

‘She
is
me. She penetrates my every thought and action, every molecule that holds me together. Just as a tree draws up the dead in its sap and its leaves, in the yellow and white of its flowers, so she is drawn up into me. See her blossoming beauty.’ He stretched his arms to the sky.

‘Who was she?’

Crowan Frayne gestured to her to approach him. Stussman did so and turned to look at the inscription on the headstone. Frayne shone a torch on the stone. She read aloud,
sotto
voce
:

‘Violet
Frayne
1908–1999,
beloved
mother
and
grandmother.
One
short
sleep
past,
we
wake
eternally,
and
death
shall
be
no
more.
Death,
thou
shalt
die.’

Frayne stood absolutely still as Stussman read. She paused and turned to him. She was close now, dangerously close.

‘It’s from the “Holy Sonnets”. Death be not proud, for though some have called thee mighty and dreadful …’

‘Thou art not so,’ said Crowan Frayne.

‘Were you very close?’

Frayne ignored her and raised his eyes to the sky. The stars blinked and sung back to him. He relaxed his grip on the torch and its light drifted over onto the next headstone. Stussman read it to herself.
‘Elizabeth
Frayne,
1944–1967.’

‘Is this your mother?’

‘She facilitated me. She was fortunate to work such an alchemy.’ Frayne knelt at Violet’s grave and scooped up a handful of dirt. He stood and placed it in his mouth, turning to face Stussman. She took an instinctive step backwards. Soil fell from Crowan Frayne’s mouth as he chewed.

‘Aristotle believed that stones and plants, animals and men all
had souls. Am I correct, Dr Stussman? I suck their souls from the earth. These flowers –’ he pulled up a clump from the ground ‘– are rich with my grandmother’s colour and spirit. Her intelligence gives their simple cell divisions and chemical reactions a breathtaking musicality.’

Frayne tore off the leaves and petals and ate them vigorously. ‘A year ago today my grandmother died under the same sky, these same stars. Her spirit was engulfed by the soft cadences of the
Harmoniae
Mundorum
– the same pitches and rhythms that we hear now, infusing this place.’ He raised his hands to the vast celestial orchestra, as if he was conducting their strange and terrible music: the music of time, separation and creation that had triangulated across the infinities and sharpened to a white-hot point in his brain. ‘And yet she remains incomplete, an abomination.’

Stussman watched him, uncertain whether to run away as his attention plummeted through the dark pools of his imagination. But he would catch her, she knew. Besides, she was lost in an unfamiliar place. He turned back to her.

‘Life is an ugliness, Dr Stussman. My grandmother defined beauty and yet she was herself an exhibit of ugliness. I was born in ugliness; the ugliness of loss and agony. My life has been an ugliness and yet I scale the heights of beauty and wit.’ He moved his hand in a sudden, flicking movement and hurled dirt and grit into Stussman’s face. She staggered back, her hands at her face, trying to push away the scratching, dirty pain in her eyes. ‘Do you feel the salty sting of my wit, Dr Stussman?’ he asked as he advanced on her. ‘Do you roast in the flames of unexpected genius? Do your eyes burn as if they had seen the very face of God?’

Stussman fell backwards over a gravestone and in a second Crowan Frayne was on her. He put his foot against her throat and quickly took the knife from her pocket, flinging it into the anonymous distance. He hauled her, kicking and writhing, back to Violet Frayne’s grave and, rolling her over, pushed her face into the dirt. Stussman panicked as the pain seared at her eyes and she struggled for breath.

‘Take a long, deep, luxurious mouthful, Dr Stussman. Let the
elemental dead crawl across your tongue and infuse your consciousness with music and colour.’ He pushed her harder into the soil. Mud forced its way into her mouth. She felt sick as it tickled her throat. ‘This is the taste of death, Dr Stussman. Relish it. There is transcendent beauty in its ugliness. The earth is enriched.
I
am
every
dead
thing/In
whom
love
wrought
new
Alchemie/For
his
art
did
expresse/A
quintessence
even
from
nothingness.
’ Frayne pulled Stussman’s face from the mud. She was coughing and retching. ‘Tonight, Dr Stussman, we will complete my grandmother’s ascent back to beauty. We will become the burning soul of wit. Through the alchemy of our intelligence, the chanting voices of the dead that we draw together and amplify, we will forge angels in the oven and rise into infinity like smoke on the wind.’

Crowan Frayne struck Heather Stussman on her right temple with the butt of his torch. Then he struck her again.

Harrison called Marty Farrell at six-fifteen that evening. He had just received a call himself from the Head Porter of Southwell College and had learned that Heather Stussman had met with the killer an hour previously. A squad car had been dispatched to the cemetery immediately and had found nothing.

Farrell picked up the phone on its fourth ring. ‘Lab.’

‘Marty, it’s Harrison.’

‘No joy as yet. The only clean match I’ve found so far is Dexter’s right index finger.’

‘Fuck. It looks like he’s taken someone else.’

Marty groaned. ‘Who?’

‘Stussman, the lecturer.’

‘Jesus.’ Marty was already exhausted and the pressure had just been upped another notch.

‘I don’t need to tell you, Marty, that it’s going to be a long night. You might be our only chance of finding this fruitcake.’

‘I realize that. You need to understand something, though.’ Farrell took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘I have started with the less common letters in the two names you gave me. I’ve looked at D, R, J, T, H, and U, and haven’t found any matches in our records except Dexter. I’m about to do Z, B, N and Y now. It’s taken me six hours to get this far. Most of the prints are partial and overlaid with others. Getting the computer to match smeared partial prints with our files is virtually impossible. If I have to broaden the search and check every print on the keyboard I shall be here all night. And some.’

‘That might be too late, Marty.’

‘I’d better get on with it, then.’

‘Call me. When you get something.’ Harrison hung up.

Marty Farrell sighed and tried to clear his head. He was beginning to think that this was a wild-goose chase. Not so much looking for a needle in a haystack as looking for a specific needle in a room full of needles. The thought of dusting and analysing every key on the computer filled him with gloom. There had to be a way he could short-cut the process. He swallowed the remains of his cup of coffee and frowned in concentration.