A QUESTION OF GUILT

him again?'

'What if I did? You're no use to any woman.'

'I am to any normal woman.'

'What are you saying? I'm not normal?'

'You suffer from nymphomania.' Belle started to laugh. It became wilder, then uncontrollable. She swung about in the chair, gripping the arms. Crippen watched her. 'I intend to treat you for it.'

'Treat me?' She stopped laughing, staring at him fixedly. 'I like that! How, I'll ask?'

'With henbane.'

'That's a poison!' she shouted.

'All drugs are poisons, unless taken in the right doses.'

'Why don't you treat Ethel Le Neve?' Belle asked thickly. 'Le Neve,' she sneered. 'She was born plain Neve, her father's a coals canvasser, who gets drunk in the pubs and gets arrested.'

'You're drunk yourself.'

Belle half-rose, gasping. 'That table! The one we played cards on. It moved. Look!' She gave a hoarse cry. 'There's something under it. A dog, a huge black dog-'

'I can't see anything,' Crippen said mildly.

Belle slumped back, holding her forehead in both hands. 'My face is burning. I'm sick, I guess. Help me to bed.'

Crippen suddenly leant over her, gripping her arms.

'How many times have you threatened to leave me?' he said with unknown venom. 'Threatened! It would be the happiest release for me and Ethel. You could take your jewels. You could take our whole Ј600 in the Charing Cross Bank. You could go off to America to Bruce Miller, to whoever you cared. But you wouldn't. You found me too useful here, working my heart out at Munyon's, the Drouet Institute, the Tooth Specialists. Providing you with clothes and comfort, a slave for anything you fancied. You've your own friends. Your own pleasures. You leave me here lonely and miserable. The only sympathy and affection I've ever had in the world is from Ethel.'

He straightened up. She sat looking dazed, slowly rubbing her arms. 'All right. All right, I'll go,' she mumbled.

'It's too late now.'

'What d'you mean?'

'I don't know. My head is full of bees,' he told her abruptly.

She half rose, face shot with terror. She screamed, 'It ain't a dog, it's a bear-'

He glanced quickly at the drawn curtains of pink velvet. They were thick enough to muffle the sound. The neighbours were anyway used to Belle's outbursts. 'There's nothing there. You're seeing things.'

'Oh, Peter…' She looked at him piteously, clutching her breast. 'My heart…my heart…it's flying from my body.'

'You're drunk. You had three glasses playing cards. Maybe that brandy's not only stronger in taste?'

She rose unsteadily from the chair. Her mouth opened, no words came. She staggered, clutching the mantelpiece, pulling the pink cloth, smashing a china cat against the gas-fire.

'Peter!' she screamed. Crippen continued staring, hands under coat-tails. 'I'm dying…' He did not move. 'I'm going next door, to Mrs Harrison…' She tried to walk, knocked over the small table, clattering the framed photographs on the floor. She crumpled. She lay face down on the carpet, giving a huge gasp. Crippen stayed immobile.

'Belle,' he said quietly.

He hesitated.

'Belle-'

He crouched and turned her half-over. Her face was dusky, her mouth slack, her eyes partly open. He stood up. 'So,' he said. He gave her chest a gentle kick, partly inquisitive, partly insolent. 'Belle has left me,' he murmured. He sounded unbelieving. He walked quickly round the room, hands in pockets. He stopped suddenly, righted the overturned table and carefully replaced the photographs. He rearranged the pink mantelpiece cover, picking up the fragments of china from the carpet, cupping them delicately in his left hand, leaving the room for the kitchen and tipping them into the round bin under the sink where Belle had scraped the leavings from their dinner plates.

He returned to the parlour, strode straight past Belle, crouched and switched off the gas-fire. Then he turned Belle on her back with his foot. He raised her eyelids, revealing pupils like black full moons. He felt her wrist for a pulse, noticing the forearms drawn in spasm, the fingers clawed. 'So Belle shall vanish,' he said. He began to undress her.

He unbuttoned her yellow silk gown down the back, unlaced the waist, pulled the bodice from her crooked arms and tugged the skirts from her feet. The cotton underskirt was soaked with urine. He remembered that Belle had not visited a certain room since dinner. He tugged off the black ankle boots with pearl buttons up the side, and unbuckled the black lisle stockings from suspenders stretching half-way down her fat thighs. He loosed the tape of her cotton knickers, which ended in six-inch frills over the knee. He unknotted the lacing of her stays, ripping them off her wobbling buttocks. She had only an undervest with six buttons, which he loosed from wallowing breasts. He had not seen her naked for five years or so. She always had him come to her in the dark, like an animal. He noticed the scar running from navel to pubic hair, the incision for the ovariotomy which turned her barren.

He unpinned the rising sun brooch, unclasped the gold chain of a lozenge-shaped diamond pendant from the fleshy, blue-tinged base of her neck, slipped off her gold wrist-watch, pulled the two diamond rings from her right hand and the ruby from her left, placed them among the photographs. Her broad gold wedding ring would not budge with determined tugs. He noticed a sticky thick smear of vomit on the carpet, noting to mop it with the kitchen dishcloth later.

Crippen hung his frock-coat over the back of a chair. He pulled Belle by her feet across the carpet into the bare-boarded hall. The clocks chimed half-past. It was only an hour since the Martinettis had left. Gripping her ankles, he pulled her up the stairs, her head bouncing from step to step, tortoiseshell combs spilling from her hair. He was sweating. He tugged her across the lino into the bathroom. Grunting, he bundled her into the bath. There was a gurgle, and faeces oozed through her flaccid anal sphincter. He wrinkled his nose, turned on the cold tap, used the rose-patterned pitcher from the marble-topped washstand to swill it down the plughole. He went downstairs, felt for his leather-covered case of instruments behind the books, and stuck Gray's Anatomy under his arm.

Belle filled the bath, breasts slid sideways, her stomach slack rolls of fat, her face blue. Crippen loosened his cufflinks and turned up his sleeves. As he moved her head, long muscle-scalpel in hand, she made a low groan. He jerked up, shocked. Was she still alive? He decided it was a post-mortem effect. He dug the scalpel into her neck to the left of her windpipe, trying to sever the tendinous end of the sternomastoid muscle from the top of the breastbone.

He pulled the knife out. It was ridiculously blunt. He inspected the edge, noticed his razor-strop on its hook below the window, and honed it for some minutes. He was delighted to find that it cut flesh like the tenderest chicken. He severed the big carotid arteries and jugular veins, blood stickying his fingers as he slit through her windpipe and gullet. He must decide the next step. He opened Gray's Anatomy on the cork-seated white bathroom chair, seeking the section Osteology, bloodying the pages as he turned them.

Crippen's anatomical knowledge was skimpy, but principles learned in the dissecting room remain in the mind, like the principles of Christianity to the theological student long left the seminary. He found the subsection _Vertebrae Cervicales_ under _Columna Vertebralis._ He dug the knife through the skin and fat of the neck, severing the elastic ligaments which join one vertebral bone and the next, like the segments of ox-tail in a stew. As he lifted Belle's head into the air, something clattered against the enamel of the bath. A circular metal Hinde's curler, with three or four inches of bleached brown hair twined in it. Belle had overlooked unclipping it with the others when she dressed. He wondered if the Martinettis had noticed it.

Reaching for a pair of long pointed scissors from the instrument case he cut the curler free, clanging to the bottom of the bath, where the headless body had trapped pools of blood. He decided to take the hair off, snipping into the rose-patterned wash-basin until the head was as bare as a nun's. He would burn the hair in the kitchen stove, with his shirt and _Gray. _Hair did not rot. The teeth, too could be an obstacle. He could extract them and