Which finds no natural outlet, no relief.
In word, or sigh, or tear.
Looking at the flowers in the light, she felt for Coleridge when he wrote, “I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!…I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” Too true, Kirsten thought. The light that danced among the leaves could give her nothing, and her inner fountains had all dried up, had all been sucked through the dark star in her mind and turned to blood.
There was no point going on. About halfway along her usual route, she turned around and headed back home. Her room was the best place to be, and the house would be quiet with everyone out. Maybe in a few weeks the emptiness and the pain would go away and she would find herself back to normal. Already, though, she was finding it hard to remember what normal was.
Two black and white cows watched her with their big mournful eyes as she crossed the narrow stretch of grass between the woods and the back gate of the house. Her head still ached, and the depression suddenly gripped her more tightly than before.
Back in the house, she wandered aimlessly from room to room for a while, thought of making a sandwich, then decided she wasn’t hungry. Getting drunk seemed like a good idea at first, but she had an even better one.
First she took a plastic bag from the cupboard under the stairs, then went up to the bathroom and opened the cabinet. Inside were the usual things: aspirin, antihistamine, antacid tablets, cold capsules, cough medicine and some old prescription antibiotics. Leaving only the cough mixture, she emptied the rest into the bag.
Next she crept into her parents’ room. They kept their various pills in the top drawer of the bedside dresser. She took out her mother’s tranquillizers and Mogadons and her father’s blood-pressure tablets and poured them all into the plastic bag too.
In her own room, she opened her shoulder bag and found the prescription analgesic the doctor had given her for her pain. It was the same bag she’d been carrying the night of the attack, and she realized that she had never really wondered what had happened to it before. The police must have been through it, then had probably returned it to her room at the hospital while she was still unconscious. Emptying it on her bed, she found half a month’s supply of birth-control pills still left. Smiling at the irony, she added them to her bagful and carried the lot back downstairs.
The living room was a huge split-level affair. At the front was a bay window that looked out on the lawn, the honeysuckle, the rose beds and the High Street beyond the white fence; at the back, French windows opened out onto the large garden, with its central copper beech, more flower beds and a croquet lawn. Beyond that was the woods. Kirsten opened the windows to let the sun slant in and sat on the carpet in its rays. She had taken a bottle of her father’s best whisky from the cocktail cabinet-Glen-where-am-I, he always called it-and set it down beside her.
She picked up the plastic bag and poured the collection of pills onto the carpet in front of her. They were all the colors of the rainbow, and more besides: blue, green, red, white, yellow, pink, orange. Then she picked a few up, trying to get a nice selection of colors in her palm, swallowed them, and washed them down with a belt of Scotch straight from the bottle.
It was idyllic, sitting cross-legged there in the honeyed sunlight as the bees droned from flower to flower outside the French windows. Kirsten hadn’t eaten all day, and she soon began to feel light-headed-light except for the dark cloud, which was far more dense than possible for something so small. At least it was small today. Sometimes it swelled up like a balloon, but today it was a nasty black marble. If she held it in her hand, she thought, it would probably burst right through her flesh with its weight.
A red one, a blue one, a yellow one, and a gulp of fiery whisky. So it went on; the level in the bottle dropped and the pile of pills on the tan carpet diminished handful by handful. Soon, Kirsten’s head was swimming. Specks of light danced behind her closed eyes. When she opened them and looked out onto the sunlit garden again, she could have sworn it was snowing out there.
27 Martha
After Martha got off the bus at the station near Valley Bridge Road in Scarborough at about one o’clock in the afternoon, the first thing she did was grab a ham and cheese sandwich and a half-pint of lager and lime in the nearest pub, a quiet, run-down place with sticky tables.
She felt much calmer than she had earlier in the day. The news had hit her so hard she had almost given up, but in the end it had only strengthened her resolve. She couldn’t go back without finishing her business on the coast. But now she knew that her precious instinct wasn’t infallible, she would have to be much more certain the next time. How she could find proof beyond what she remembered of his appearance and voice, she didn’t know. Perhaps she would have to lure him on and confront him. When Grimley had said he didn’t remember her, he had been telling the truth. The real killer most likely would remember her, and if she could get him to admit to that, then she would be sure. She didn’t want to leave a string of bodies behind her before she got the right one. She shivered at the thought of turning into the kind of monster she was out to destroy.
She stubbed out her cigarette and got up to leave. Things weren’t as simple as they had been a couple of days ago. Now there was a chance that the police would soon identify Grimley and start looking into his death. Martha couldn’t let herself get caught. She had already moved out of the Abbey Terrace room, but there were a few other things she could do to preserve her freedom before returning to Whitby.
She walked past the train station, then turned right down Westborough, where there seemed to be plenty of activity. The street guide she’d bought in Whitby gave her some sense of direction as she explored the side streets, but it didn’t mark the main shopping areas. From what she could see, however, she was close to what she needed. The weather was just as gray as it had been earlier in Whitby, though the drizzle had stopped and it was warm enough now for her to take off her quilted jacket and carry it over her arm.
What she needed first was a big department store. Marks amp; Spencer would do fine, she thought, noticing the frontage: the clothes there were well made and reasonably stylish, but not too expensive. After wandering around the ladies’ wear floor and flicking through the racks, she chose a plain, pleated black skirt, which hung well below her knees, and some black patterned tights to go with it. For the top, she bought a cream cotton blouse which buttoned up to the throat. She also picked out a navy-blue cardigan in case it got cool again.
In the shoe department, she chose a pair of no-nonsense pumps-sensible shoes, her mother would have called them-durable enough and easy to walk in. As soon as she had made her purchases, she went outside to a public toilet and changed, storing her old gear-jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and quilted jacket-in the holdall. No point throwing the stuff away, she thought. Nobody was likely to want to search her bag, and she could certainly wear the clothes again. She studied herself in the mirror and approved of the result. Nice girl, secretary perhaps, or receptionist. It was just the right inconspicuous, anonymous effect she was after. To improve the new look, she could also start wearing her glasses instead of contact lenses.
The sun had bored a few ragged holes through the cloud covering, and families were heading down Eastborough toward the South Beach. The children no longer hung onto their parents’ hands, but dawdled and squabbled, swinging bright plastic buckets and spades. The occasional courting couple ambled by, hand in hand, in no hurry to be anywhere as long as they were with each other.
Martha found a Boots and made a beeline for the makeup counter. There she bought the basics: lipstick, eye shadow, mascara, foundation, blusher-all in perfectly ordinary, conservative colors. In a cafe toilet across the street, she stood next to another woman who was also doing her face. The woman smiled and made small talk about the weather and the way men always complained about how long a woman spent in the toilet.
“And do you know,” she went on, squinting as she applied thick mascara, “I don’t even think they notice the difference when we come back. What do they think we’re doing in here all that time? Do they think our bladders take longer to empty or something?” She chuckled, then sighed. “Is it worth it? I ask myself.” She put on a coating of glossy red lipstick and patted her lips with a Kleenex to remove the excess. Then she sucked and pursed them a few times, just to make sure.
Martha looked at her and noticed the red stain on her front teeth. It made her think of vampires. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I suppose it depends on what you want.”
This was too philosophical for the woman. She crumpled the smeared tissue and dropped it in the bin, then
