declined to comment.
Martha felt herself grow cold. The conversations going on around her turned to a meaningless background hum. All she could hear clearly was the litany of names running through her mind: Margaret Snell, Kathleen Shannon, Jane Pitcombe, Kim Waterford, Jill Sarsden. And now another, name unknown. Hands shaking, she lit another cigarette from the stub of her old one and read the article again. It said exactly the same, word for word. The “Student Slasher” had struck again. She had been mistaken in Grimley. She had killed the wrong man.
Choking back the vomit, she crushed out her cigarette, rushed to the tiny toilet and locked the door behind her. After bringing up her breakfast, she splashed icy water on her face and leaned against the sink breathing fast and deep. She still felt dizzy. Everything was spinning around her as if she was standing on a high balcony suffering from vertigo. Her skin felt cold and clammy; her mouth tasted dry and sour. She took a deep breath and held it. Another. Another. Her pulse began to steady.
The wrong man, she thought, sitting down on the toilet and holding her head in her hands. And she had been so damn sure. The hoarse voice, the accent, the callused hands, the low, dark fringe, the glittering eyes-it had all been right. So where did she go wrong? She couldn’t have been thinking clearly at all. It had already occurred to her that her original theory-that he was a fisherman-must have been wrong, but she had gone ahead anyway. Her search had been based on slender enough evidence from the start. Anyone else would have said that she was looking for a needle in a haystack and, what’s more, that she had no idea which haystack it was supposed to be in. But Martha had trusted her instincts. She had been sure that she would find him and that she would know him when she did. Well, so much for her bloody instincts.
Looking back, she could see that she should have known, that her perception had been flawed. He was too young, for a start, and though the voice was close, certainly in accent, it was pitched lower and had less of a rasp. The eyes and hands were the same, but there had been no deeply etched lines on his face.
How could she have let herself get carried away? This made her a murderer, pure and simple. There was no excuse. She remembered with a shudder his body twitching on the sand in the moonlight, the shattered bone and the sticky brain matter beneath her fingertips and the stifling sea-wrack smell of the cave. She had killed an innocent man. A man who would probably have forced himself on her eventually anyway, true-but an innocent man. And now she had to live with it.
She got up, drank some water from the tap and washed her face. She looked pale, but not enough that people would really notice. Taking another deep breath, she unbolted the door and walked back to her table. She seemed steady enough on her feet. She hoped nobody in the cafe had seen the way she had panicked. Still, they would have no idea why. Her coffee had cooled down, but the cigarette, improperly stubbed out, still smoldered in the ashtray. The story in the folded paper stared up at her. She turned it over and stared out of the window. Holidaymakers drifted by like shades in limbo. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” she found herself thinking, but she couldn’t remember where the words came from.
Should she call the hunt off, then, go back home to the shell of a life she had made for herself? No. Even now, at such a low point, she knew she must not do that. If she did, then it all came to nothing. Grimley would have died for nothing. Only if she fulfilled her purpose, set out to do what she had to, would any of it mean anything. She was still convinced she had got the right place: she would find her man in Whitby, or somewhere very close by. He was still here.
She grieved for Jack Grimley, would do anything to undo what she had done. But, she reminded herself, this was a war of a kind, and in war there are no innocent bystanders. Grimley might have been a good person, but he was still a man. To Martha, all men were potentially the same as the one she sought. Grimley, given the chance, would have led her into one of those caves and tried to rip her clothes off and…It didn’t bear thinking about. Men were all the same, all violators and murderers of women. No doubt the real “Student Slasher” was an ordinary, well-respected citizen on the outside. Maybe he even had a wife and children. But Martha didn’t care about that. She just wanted to kill him.
Why did he travel inland so often? Was it just because that was where the universities were, or was it something to do with his work? She could no longer bank on his being a fisherman, after all, so maybe he was a traveling salesman based in Whitby. This was the kind of thing she had to do now-think again, plan again, act again. She couldn’t let herself get dragged down by one mistake, no matter how horrifying it was. She had simply been too eager, too sure of herself, too impatient. She would have to focus more clearly on the task ahead, bring her intellect into harmony with her instinct. So start by thinking, she told herself. He travels inland frequently. Why? There, at least, was something concrete, a place to start.
“Anything else, love?”
“What?”
It was the waitress clearing away the empty table next to hers. “Another cup of coffee?”
“Yes, all right.” Her last one had gone cold, anyway, Martha remembered.
“You stay there and I’ll bring it over, love. You’re looking a bit peaky. Had a shock?”
Martha shook her head. “Thank you. No, no. Nothing serious.” She would have to watch herself, she realized. It wouldn’t do at all if she went around town making a spectacle of herself. People would remember her.
When the waitress had brought the coffee, Martha returned to her thoughts. She knew that Superintendent Elswick and his minions would be wasting their time trying to figure out the killer’s motives and come up with a psychological profile. It hadn’t got them very far yet, had it? But she didn’t give a damn about the man’s unhappy childhood or the time he’d been forced to kiss his dead grandmother. Maybe his mother had abandoned him and gone to university. Perhaps that was why he always attacked young female students. Perhaps he had a daughter who had been corrupted as a student. Or maybe he just thought university campuses were dens of iniquity, full of sluts and sex-crazed bitches, the kind of place he was most likely to find loose women-and women liberated, careless or foolish enough to walk home alone in the dark. Again, she didn’t care. When she found him she wasn’t going to psychoanalyze him. She was going to kill him. Simple as that.
The rush of thoughts lifted Martha’s spirits. It proved that her mind was working clearly again and that she could harden herself against experience, as she had to. When she looked back on what she had done the other night, keeping the grotesque images at bay, she saw that there was good in it, too. It hadn’t really been a wasted effort at all. If she looked at it from a positive viewpoint, she could see killing Grimley as a kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing. A horrible thought, perhaps, but at least now she knew she could go through with it. Grimley’s murder had also been an initiation of a kind, a baptism in blood. She had killed once; therefore, she could kill again. Only next time, she thought, fingering the paperweight in her holdall, she would be certain to get it right.
26 Kirsten
Kirsten remembered how she used to love the gossamer light in the woods, green and silver filaments dancing in the leaves, and the way it shot through gaps in the foliage here and there and lit up clumps of bluebells or tiny forget-me-nots by the brook, making them seem like still-life paintings rather than living, growing plants.
Today, though, she felt no elation as she trudged along the winding path under the high trees. After two days of hiding in her room, she had made the effort to go out-more for her parents’ sake than for her own. Her father was beginning to look even more haggard than ever, and her mother was getting more impatient by the minute. They were almost at their wits’ end with her, she could tell. They wanted to tell her to put the unpleasantness behind her, stop moping and get on with her life. Only pity prevented them. They still felt sorry for her, and it was a sorrow they couldn’t give voice to. So she had come to the woods to get them off her back. If she pretended all was well, they wouldn’t know any different.
And it had worked. As soon as she had come downstairs the previous evening, they had cheered up, offered her a drink and sat companionably watching television with her. That morning, her father had returned to work, albeit reluctantly, and her mother had said she was going to Wells to do some shopping, as Bath was getting far too shabby and touristy of late.
But nature did nothing for Kirsten. As she walked, she remembered a passage from Coleridge’s “Dejection” ode:
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief.
