Transgressions (37 page)

Along with the tea she heated up some mince pies and they ate them in the living room, sitting away from the windows. She glanced around the place, trying to see it through their eyes—the gap where the chaise longue had been, the one solitary present under the tree. It looked rather sad. But it was none of their business, her life. They were just there to save it.

Eight o’clock turned to nine. They made it clear that the best thing would be if she could act normally, do whatever she would have done at this time of night. But the word
normal
seemed to have gone from her vocabulary. She spent some time upstairs sorting out her study, moving bits of paper from one side of the desk to the other, but the walls throbbed with the leftover ketchup stains and the lights across the gardens burned brighter than any she could put on.

When she couldn’t think of anything else to do, she went downstairs to make herself a hot drink. It was after ten and they had already taken up their positions: the man in the back room (nearest to the kitchen), the woman in the front, lights off, everything silent. Their knowledge of previous cases would no doubt have told them what time he went stalking, alerted them to any kind of pattern. She was aware of the intense irony of the situation. There they were with their theories and reports and suspicions, all obviously considered too confidential to disclose to a potential victim. There she was, not only knowing the man they were searching for but having had him in her bed, even having written him love letters.

It made her realize that at some point she would have to tell them about the book extracts. Not yet, though. Until they found them in his apartment how could she know that he’d been collecting them? No reason for her to know who was going through her rubbish.

It also meant she would have to send Charles a version of that final sex scene, to prove its authenticity. Poor Charlie. He’d think she’d gone mad, unless she braved it out and pretended that it was faithful to the original. After all, he wanted a bestseller, so why be squeamish about how he got it? Maybe she’d find herself writing bodice rippers after this, becoming rich and famous, until, at last, she wrote a book about a woman persecuted by a stalker. . . .

She offered them more tea but they turned it down. They were working now and needed to be alone. As she cleared up the kitchen she could feel them in their separate rooms, getting ready for the night. The tension of their presence filled the bottom floor of the house, like a low mist hovering over a landscape.

She made herself a drink and went out of the kitchen, deliberately leaving the door ajar behind her. She looked back into the darkness. Come on, she thought, something for everyone: food and entertainment. Come and get it.

“I
’m going to bed now.” She put her head around the back door to where the man was sitting in the shadows. “I’ve left on the central heating. It makes the odd noise, creaking, that kind of thing. Just in case you think . . .” She trailed off.

“Thanks,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Yes.”

Next door Veronica was tucked into an armchair behind the door, sitting very still, hands resting in her lap, like someone who practiced yoga.

They exchanged good-nights, but she couldn’t quite leave it there. She sat herself on the edge of the sofa. After a while she said, “I don’t know if I’ll sleep.”

The policewoman nodded sympathetically. “Have you got anything you can take?”

She shook her head. She looked over at the tree, all bright lights and trimmings. “It’s a weird way to spend Christmas Eve, eh?”

The woman smiled. “I can think of nicer.”

“But not as exciting, I bet.” She hesitated. “Do you get frightened?”

“Not really. In this kind of case the waiting is more boring than frightening.”

“And what if something happens?”

“If something happens then you’re too busy to be scared.”

“Yes,” she said, thinking back to a man at the bottom of her bed. “I imagine that’s true. Well, let’s hope you get busy tonight.”

The woman seemed to study her in the darkness. “Don’t worry,” she said quietly. “He won’t get anywhere near you. We’ll see to that.”

She sounded so determined, as if there were something personal in it for her. Had she interviewed some of the other women? Seen what he could do? She was torn between wanting to know everything and nothing. “Just in case I miss it all, have fun.”

Upstairs she ran a hot bath, but the idea of lying there naked made her feel too vulnerable and she let the water run away without getting in. In the bedroom she looked out over the gardens and the blaze of windows lit up in the freezing night. Would this view ever be ordinary again? In the back garden next door a squat figure rose up from the middle of an icy lawn, battered hat perched on a snowball-sized head, a scarf ’round its thick neck and what must be a carrot for a nose: a modern snowman trying to look like an illustration from a children’s book. Nobody knows how to do these things for real anymore, she thought. We’re always just copying something we thought we once knew, even if it never really existed.

She moved over to the door and turned on the light, leaving the curtains open, then came back into the room and started undressing. She imagined her silhouette in the window frame seen through the lens of a Peeping Tom, binocular eyes greedy for snapshot lust: a glimpse of inner thigh as the stockings roll off (tights had wreaked havoc with the elegance of fantasy), the line of the breasts as the woman lifts the T-shirt over her head. It was always a good moment, when the top covers the head. Less problem with personality that way. She thought all this as she pulled off her sweater, stepped out of her trousers, and undid her bra, her lack of speed the only concession to a possible voyeur. Would he be watching? If he’d read the letter he’d be undressing her anyway, in his head if not through his eyes. She shivered as she pulled on a nightgown.

When would he come? Did he need her to be asleep? Maybe it didn’t work unless you caught them unawares, wrenched them out of dreams to face the nightmare. Well, tough luck. This time he wouldn’t even get up the stairs.

She got into bed, the sheets cold to the touch. She remembered her blood, and the streaks of his semen running down her legs. She saw his face again as he turned and walked out, like a sullen child. What if he didn’t come back? What if the very act of her wanting him made him resist? Or, even worse, made him smell a trap? Under her pillow she fingered the plastic bag, feeling the shape of the hammer through the covering. She had put it there before the police arrived, protection in case he saw her invitation as an excuse to turn up without a weapon. This way she had both weapon and finger-prints. At some point she would need to plant it downstairs or outside. But not until the coat hanger went through the cat flap and started to scrape at the lock. Would she be able to hear so particular a noise from up here? Why not? She had heard it enough times in her head since.

Not yet though. The digital clock by her bed clicked to 10:56. Christmas Eve. She thought of Catherine Baker, standing by the altar, newly painted walls, reconstructed crib, and a hundred candles flickering in homage to a more medieval festival.

On the radio she cruised through Christmas Muzak, the Beatles, and jazz to what sounded like Radio 3: a man with rounded vowels was talking in church, telling of times when carols were pagan dances, too dangerous for institutionalized religion, but too powerful to leave outside. So the early Church had set about absorbing them, prettying them up, stilling the feet, taming the spirit. But it would still have been bleak midwinter. How did you keep warm if you couldn’t dance?

She imagined Catherine Baker throwing off her dog collar and gyrating over the altar to the sound of high-energy carols. Then watched as a group of men smashed down the doors outside and came rushing in, pinning her to the altar steps, forcing her cassock up above her waist: the images of exploitation, as copycat and stultifying to the imagination as the carrot for the snowman’s nose.

The commentator stopped talking and the choir began: a multitude of the heavenly host praising God in the highest of keys. Choirboys—nothing like that last sweetness before the testosterone kicks in. But you can’t keep them like that forever. No juice. Not fair. Everybody needs juice.

She lay and listened in the darkness; the readings told of censors and journeys and stable midwifery. Was the birth as immaculate as the conception? Did the cows eat the placenta and lick up the blood, clean up the babe before the swaddling clothes went on, large rough tongues over slimy little limbs? It was not the kind of detail that made it into any gospel. The choir hustled in the shepherds, the Wise Men, and the happy ending. The announcer wished everybody a merry Christmas.

Midnight.

You could almost feel the world sigh as the clock moved.

S
he turned off the radio and stayed inside the silence. This time last year she and Tom had been lying in a four-poster bed in a fancy hotel in northern France, their bodies curled as far away from each other as it was possible to get. They had come on a morning ferry, winter winds across black seas, sipping brandy to keep their stomachs level. Off the boat they had driven for two and a half hours down the valley to a picturesque little market town, recommended in all the guides, with a ruined fortress, and streets of formal shuttered houses with their echoes of Madame Bovary–type frustration. It was too beautiful a place to be unhappy in and they had started drinking early to blot out the pain: crisp white wines to go with winter oysters, cold and briny like the North Sea, followed by a three-course dinner with selected local reds—Tom knew his wines—and, at the end, a selection of different, richer brandies. The more they drank the less they had to talk to each other. It was a method of noncommunication perfected over the last months.

Upstairs he had fallen asleep almost immediately, snoring as he often did after too much booze. If the hotel hadn’t been full she would have taken another room just to get away from him. As it was she had lain awake for hours trying to trace the line of how they had got to this: where it had all gone, the pleasure and the passion. She had made a vow to herself that night. Whatever happened, by this time next year she would be alone. And however bad it was, it would not be as bad as this.

Of all the many roads she had imagined leading away from Tom, this one had not been on the map. In the last year she had had two men; one she had frightened, the other had frightened her, one she had cried with, the other she had made cry. Neither had really known the meaning of sexual pleasure. I want a lover, she thought. A man who isn’t scared of me or of himself, someone who will put his fingers up inside me and find my heart. What was it her gay friend Maurice had once said to her? That when you were fist-fucked you could almost imagine his hand reaching up through your body and grabbing at your heart. Love and pain. Maybe they were never meant to be separated. Maybe romance was like icing on the cake, too sweet to have any real taste.

S
he pulled herself up against the pillows and looked out onto the empty room. She saw him again sitting at the end of the bed, his body shaking with tension. Did you really think you could just walk in here and fuck me? she thought. That I was your right, like the woman in the pub, or the one at the bus stop? Well, now it’s your turn to find out how it feels to be so frightened.

She closed her eyes, tired of the sight of his wiry body and lopsided smile. She tried to think of something else. Then she tried to think of nothing. She tried to sleep. She tried to stay awake. Still no sound of entry.

It must have been sometime after three when she heard the movement from below, a sort of scraping metallic noise, over so fast that she thought she might have imagined it. Her body had heard it, too, though; a flush of terror swept through her, hot and cold at the same time. She slid the plastic bag from under the pillow, got out of bed, and glided silently to the top of the stairs. Nobody had given her any instructions as to what to do if it happened. But if he was there she was going to see him. She waited. Then, after about a minute or so, she heard something else, a series of footfalls with the crack of a floorboard underneath. The whole house seemed to jump to attention at the sound.

She squatted down and gazed between the banisters. On the landing, at the top of the stairs that led down to the kitchen, a figure was flattened against the wall, more a shadow than a man. In the doorway to the living room Veronica was standing, freeze-frame.

The policewoman looked up and saw her on the stairs. She gave a quick flick of the hand to keep her away, but at that instant her partner went for the door and Veronica was across the hall and behind him within seconds.

Elizabeth heard the crack as the kitchen door smashed open against the wall, presumably under the force of his foot, and the light went on. She waited for the shouts. But they didn’t come. Nothing. Then she heard the metallic snap of the cat flap and a harsh little laugh. The light went off again. She stashed the plastic bag hurriedly in the bathroom at the top of the stairs and tiptoed downstairs.

They were already back up on the landing.

“What happened?”

He snapped his head up toward her, clearly pissed off to see her there.

“Nothing. Go back to bed.”

“What happened?”