Transgressions (40 page)

He moved away from her and fumbled with his trousers, ripping at the stud, pushing down at the waistband to free himself. This was the bit you never saw in the movies. Even the most violent of rape scenes stopped short of showing the engorged cock. Instead you got to read the size of the erection from the panic and trauma
in
the woman’s face, her fear working as the trigger of fantasy. The perfect censorship for voyeurism.

He let out a grunt as the trousers came free and slid down to his knees and pushed himself toward her. And as he did so she suddenly knew what it was that hadn’t made sense to her earlier. If he had spent so long watching them watching him, when could he possibly have had time for St. John’s Way?

There was no space to think of it now. Pinning her shoulders to the door he tried to slam himself into her. But this bit wasn’t like the movies. With her body half slumped on the ground he couldn’t penetrate properly, couldn’t negotiate the angle of entrance. The failure drove him wild. “Get up,” he shouted, trying to push her body to a standing position. “Get up or I’ll cut you in two.”

Then came the noise. A battering, crashing wail from the French windows. They both turned their heads in time to witness the extraordinary sight of a middle-aged woman in a winter coat hurling herself at the window, her arms outstretched against the glass like some crazed avenging angel.

Christmas morning, and if you can’t go to church, then the Church will come to you. The window shook under the impact but it didn’t give. While the spirit was willing the flesh was weak. And since it is God’s will that the contest between good and evil should be a fair one, Catherine Baker now found herself trapped on the outside, a helpless witness to the dance of death unfolding within.

In the kitchen, the sight of her drove him into a frenzy. But it also distracted his attention for a split second. Now she was ready for him. Using both her hands she grabbed the handle of the oven and, as he turned back to her, yanked the door open with all her might. The side of it caught him full in the face, sending him sprawling backward into the table. She manipulated the cords on her left hand frantically. As he righted himself she saw there was blood flowing from above one eye. The twine was almost loose enough. He came toward her again. This time she used her foot, going for the exposed groin, missing it, but connecting near enough to the swelling to cause him a crippling pain.

Outside she could hear Catherine shouting, the voice rich and strong, trained on sermons and blessings, raising the alarm. She gave one last tug and her left hand came free. She picked frantically at the right, but the noose was still too tight. With her good hand she could now reach the counter. She grabbed the scissors and started hacking at the twine between her wrist and the door handle.

He was already uncurling himself from the floor and coming at her, his right eye completely obscured by blood. The twine gave way just as he reached her and she turned, the scissors clasped in front of her.

He rammed so hard into her that it sent the handle digging deep into her stomach. His groan was like the one she remembered from his orgasm, rising up from somewhere dark inside him. He stood rigid against her, his eyes staring into hers, as if trying to work out how it was that she could have hurt him so much, then he fell heavily against her. She had to put her arms around him to stop him crashing to the ground. They stood there clinging to each other, the sticky wetness growing between them like the first wild flow of menstrual blood.

Suddenly, it was as if someone had turned out all the other lights in the world; they were alone together, no avenging angels, no disturbance, not even any voices through the glass. Just a man and a woman squeezed into the stillness between the hands of the clock, all their energy focused on his pain and the greedy, gushing blood.

When she couldn’t hold him any longer she slumped down onto the floor, grasping his body and pulling it half across her legs in a bloody pietà. There was so much blood now; it was gulping out over him, soaking his shirt, running down onto her bare legs, the scissors jutting awkwardly from the wound. She was too scared to touch them. He was too bound up inside the pain to care. The one time in her life when she had really hurt herself, had burned a layer of skin off the palm of her hand, the agony had been so intense that the world around had ceased to exist; there had been just her and it, locked in total combat. She saw the same thing in him now.

“It’s okay,” she said hoarsely, her voice raw from all kinds of damage. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. Hang on.”

But even as she said it she knew
it
was a lie. He tried to say something in response, but the words came out as a vomit of blood, oozing down his chin and onto her hand supporting his head. The feel of it was warm and generous. One more appalling intimacy between them.

He shivered and she pulled her arms tighter around his shoulders, bending her body over him until her head was cradled next to his. It was like the end of their lovemaking, when she had hugged him and he had started to cry. She should have known then that he wasn’t a killer. That the hammer was just a piece of copycat bravura, and that underneath all that fury and frustration there was only pain.

He was having trouble breathing now, the air in his lungs mingling with the blood and sending a gurgling sound up through his throat. It reminded her of Millie when she had found her under the bushes. Another part of their story. They had so much history between them. A relationship really. But, then, that was what it had been. She knew that now. Soon she would be the only one to know it. To know exactly what it was he had done. And what he hadn’t.

She stared down at his face. His skin was going gray; you could actually watch it happen, see the blood and the life draining away. They had been through so much together. Why be embarrassed by difficult questions now? She put her lips next to his ear. “Can you hear me?” she whispered.

He made a small noise. How familiar they are to me, she thought, all your little grunts and moans.

“It was only me, wasn’t it? That’s what you meant about choosing me. You never did anything to anybody else, did you? It was always only me.”

A frown flickered over his face, but if he had anything to say, the time for saying it had already passed. Even the blood was ebbing slowly now, the trickle from his mouth already drying on her fingers, crusting on his chin. Instead there was only the pressure of her arms around him and the long wait for the help that was never going to arrive in time. As it hadn’t in his life, so it wouldn’t in his death.

At some point—she would never know when—the world began again and she found herself back within it. From the commotion going on behind her, she understood that the French windows were being forced open. Then came the sound of someone in the room.

“We need help here,” she said loudly, her back to the figure, and as she did so she realized she was crying. “We need an ambulance.”

“It’s on its way, Elizabeth,” the voice replied gently, but it didn’t come any nearer, didn’t try to interfere. Clever Catherine: a woman who knew how to get a number from an unanswered call; a woman who would climb walls when she couldn’t get in through front doors. But most of all a woman who recognized a spiritual need as well as a physical one.

She looked down at him, but he didn’t seem aware of her any longer. There was nothing else she could give him. It was finished between them. When the end came it was scarcely noticeable. No great Victorian death rattle, not even a last wild sigh, just a stopping, a ceasing, a breath that didn’t come after the last one. An absence almost, and a sense of release.

One of his arms had fallen at a strange angle to his body. She picked it up carefully and laid it on his chest. It was then, for the first time, that she noticed the wristwatch. Surprising that she hadn’t recognized it before. So easily done—pick it up from a bedside table and slip it onto your own wrist. Of course he would have known where it had been. Two lovers. One watch. Had it given him a sense of ownership or just a sense of time? He didn’t need
it
now. She slipped it over his hand and onto her own.

Behind her she became aware of Catherine’s voice, low and rhythmic, speaking intently, with a sense of purpose. But not to her. Given the circumstances of this particular leaving someone would need to have a word with God. And who better to do the interceding?

epilogue

S
ometime after dark it started snowing again, tentatively this time, more like an afterthought, watery little flakes caught in flurries of wind. She stood by the glass and watched them fall.

The room was cold, the boarded-up window adequate for security but not for drafts. If she was going to stay up longer she’d need to put on the central heating again. She ought to sleep now, but she wasn’t ready to leave the room. It wasn’t that she was scared—from the moment she had held him in her arms all the fear had somehow been washed out of her—more that she needed to get used to being on her own again. After twelve hours of policemen, doctors, and forensic gatherers crawling like lice over the kitchen, their absence was almost as disconcerting as their presence.

The first thing she did was to take a scrubbing brush to the floor. In the movies the stain always remains, the blood soaking through the cracks into the very fabric of the world, black instead of red. But here, in her kitchen, she found that it washed away too easily. She looked around her. Clean the surfaces, put the hinge back on the oven, take off the boards and reglaze the windows and there would be nothing left. Nothing, that is, but her memory. Somehow it didn’t seem enough. She left a corner of the stain untouched. Maybe given time it would seep its way into the wood. A wound in the floor. It was the most and the least she could offer him.

Police files would supply the rest of his immortality, though he would always be a footnote rather than a headline. Mad stalker as opposed to serial killer. That was what the army of fluid and fiber collectors were there to verify; there was only one scene to his crime, and only one victim.

They hadn’t needed much convincing.

From what they had told her it sounded almost routine. Like many before him, the real Holloway Hammer had turned out to be an otherwise respectable fellow: a freelance car mechanic, married, with two kids, living in Hendon and working on a breakdown contract for the Automobile Association in the Islington-Holloway area. The kind of job that took him all places at all hours. Especially in the winter. But on St. Johns Way at four that Christmas morning his luck had run out when a woman across the road had spotted a suspicious-looking man coming out of a basement apartment and walking to the end of the road to where an AA truck was parked. Sometime, somewhere, even the cleverest of them get careless.

He’d been playing with his kids when they got to him, setting up a Christmas model garage for his youngest boy, his wife in the kitchen peeling the Brussels sprouts for lunch. Just a regular sort of guy. Hard to imagine his family visiting him in prison.

She had listened quietly while Veronica related it—the two of them sitting together in the living room as they had the night before. When she got to the capture the policewoman had barely been able to conceal her excitement. Maybe this was a first time for her, too.

As for the others, they had been kindness itself. The police doctor they brought in had offered painkillers and sedatives. She took the first and refused the second; even so, her throat was too swollen to do much talking. They didn’t seem to mind. Most of what they needed to know was there for them to see. She added only what was necessary. The rest she kept private, between him and her. Like the end of any relationship, it was not for public consumption.

Later, Catherine Baker had called to offer her a bed for the night. But there would be time enough for the two of them to talk if the guilt didn’t wash away with the bloodstains, and for this of all nights she needed to be alone.

She went upstairs and ran herself a bath. She stripped off her trousers (her other clothes—the blood-soaked skirt and the top—were long gone, preserved in plastic and carefully labeled for forensic labs), and as she did so something fell out of her pocket. The wristwatch from his hand. She had slipped it in there during the interrogation and then forgotten all about it. Strictly speaking it was evidence now. But not unless she told them. She picked it up and let it lie in the palm of her hand. To whom did it belong now? Caught between the two men, maybe it would be okay to keep it herself. Or maybe not.

She looked at the time: 11:10
P.M.
Christmas Day. A lot of dope and videos would have gone down by now. In another incarnation she might have felt like phoning him. But not now.

She laid the watch on the edge of the bathtub, near to her head, and soaked in the hot foam, eyes closed, listening as it ticked away the seconds till midnight.

Afterward she put on her robe and returned to the kitchen.

She stood in the doorway and took it all in: the smashed window, the scrubbed floor, the leftovers of a violent history. What did she feel? Sorrow? Pity? An echo of fear? The words of the Morrison song came back to her. “So quiet in here, so peaceful.”

The snow had stopped now and the garden was dark. She moved over to the counter. She turned on the stereo, her fingers picking up the dust of fingerprint powder. She blew them clean, then pushed the eject button. The CD compartment slid open, but the disc was gone. Police business, no doubt. It seemed almost fitting, the whole thing ending as it had begun.
Enlightenment.
She had another copy of it somewhere, but it was too early to be that brave. She would play it again though. She knew that now. Because although she didn’t quite understand why, it was clear that in some way the healing had begun. She turned the phrase over in her mind. It found its own cadence. “And the Healing Has Begun”: track eight from the album
Into the Music,
blue cover, 1979. Van the Man in love and in recovery.