task required. His skin reddened under her gaze.
'Let me be, J. I can't help you. I'm useless to you.'
It was true. He was absolutely useless. Contemptuously, she let his hands go. They fell limply by his sides.
'Don't ever try and find me, Titus. You understand? Don't ever send your minions after me to preserve your reputation, because I will be more merciless than you've ever been.'
He said nothing; just knelt there, facing the window, while she washed her face, drank the coffee they'd ordered, and left.
Lyndon was surprised to find the door of his office ajar. It was only seven-thirty-six. None of the secretaries would be in for another hour. Clearly one of the cleaners had been remiss, leaving the door unlocked. He'd find out who: sack her.
He pushed the door open.
Jacqueline was sitting with her back to the door. He recognized the back of her head, that fall of auburn hair. A sluttish display; too teased, too wild. His office, an annex to Mr Pettifer's, was kept meticulously ordered. He glanced over it: everything seemed to be in place.
'What are you doing here?'
She took a little breath, preparing herself.
This was the first time she had planned to do it. Before it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision.
He was approaching the desk, and putting down his briefcase and his neatly-folded copy of the Financial Times.
'You have no right to come in here without my permission,' he said.
She turned on the lazy swivel of his chair; the way he did when he had people in to discipline.
'Lyndon,' she said.
'Nothing you can say or do will change the facts, Mrs Ess,' he said, saving her the trouble of introducing the subject, 'you are a cold-blooded killer. It was my bounden duty to inform Mr Pettifer of the situation.'
'You did it for the good of Titus?'
'Of course.'
'And the blackmail, that was also for the good of Titus, was it?'
'Get out of my office —'
'Was it, Lyndon?'
'You're a whore! Whores know nothing: they are ignorant, diseased animals,' he spat. 'Oh, you're cunning, I grant you that — but then so's any slut with a living to make.'
She stood up. He expected a riposte. He got none; at least not verbally. But he felt a tautness across his face: as though someone was pressing on it.
'What... are... you... doing?' he said.
'Doing?'
His eyes were being forced into slits like a child imitating a monstrous Oriental, his mouth was hauled wide and tight, his smile brilliant. The words were difficult to say — 'Stop.. .it...' She shook her head. 'Whore...' he said again, still defying her. She just stared at him. His face was beginning to jerk and twitch under the pressure, the muscles going into spasm.
'The police...' he tried to say, 'if you lay a finger on me...'
'I won't,' she said, and pressed home her advantage. Beneath his clothes he felt the same tension all over his body, pulling his skin, drawing him tighter and tighter.
Something was going to give; he knew it. Some part of him would be weak, and tear under this relentless assault. And if he once began to break open, nothing would prevent her ripping him apart. He worked all this out quite coolly, while his body twitched and he swore at her through his enforced grin.
'Cunt,' he said. 'Syphilitic cunt.'
He didn't seem to be afraid, she thought.
In extremis he just unleashed so much hatred of her, the fear was entirely eclipsed. Now he was calling her a whore again; though his face was distorted almost beyond recognition.
And then he began to split.
The tear began at the bridge of his nose and ran up, across his brow, and down, bisecting his lips and his chin, then his neck and chest. In a matter of seconds his shirt was dyed red, his dark suit darkening further, his cuffs and trouser-legs pouring blood. The skin flew off his hands like gloves off a surgeon, and two rings of scarlet tissue lolled down to either side of his flayed face like the ears of an elephant.
His name-calling had stopped.
He had been dead of shock now for ten seconds, though she was still working him over vengefully, tugging his skin off his body and flinging the scraps around the room, until at last he stood, steaming, in his red suit, and his red shirt, and his shiny red shoes, and looked, to her eyes, a little more like a sensitive man. Content with the effect, she released him. He lay down quietly in a blood puddle and slept.
My God, she thought, as she calmly took the stairs out the back way, that was murder in the first degree.
She saw no reports of the death in any of the papers, and nothing on the news bulletins. Lyndon had apparently died as he had lived, hidden from public view.
But she knew wheels, so big their hubs could not be seen by insignificant individuals like herself, would be moving. What they would do, how they would change her life, she could only guess at. But the murder of Lyndon had not simply been spite, though that had been a part of it. No, she'd also wanted to stir them up, her enemies in the world, and bring them after her. Let them show their hands: let them show their contempt, their terror. She'd gone through her life, it seemed, looking for a sign of herself, only able to define her nature by the look in others' eyes. Now she wanted an end to that. It was time to deal with her pursuers.
Surely now everyone who had seen her, Pettifer first, then Vassi, would come after her, and she would close their eyes permanently: make them forgetful of her. Only then, the witnesses destroyed, would she be free.
Pettifer didn't come, of course, not in person. It was easy for him to find agents, men without scruple or compassion, but with a nose for pursuit that would shame a bloodhound.
A trap was being laid for her, though she couldn't yet see its jaws. There were signs of it everywhere. An eruption of birds from behind a wall, a peculiar light from a distant window, footsteps, whistles, dark-suited men reading the news at the limit of her vision. As the weeks passed they didn't come any closer to her, but then neither did they go away. They waited, like cats in a tree, their tails twitching, their eyes lazy.
But the pursuit had Pettifer's mark. She'd learned enough from him to recognize his circumspection and his guile. They would come for her eventually, not in her time, but in theirs. Perhaps not even in theirs: in his. And though she never saw his face, it was as though Titus was on her heels personally.
My God, she thought, I'm in danger of my life and I don't care.
It was useless, this power over flesh, if it had no direction behind it. She had used it for her own petty reasons, for the gratification of nervous pleasure and sheer anger. But these displays hadn't brought her any closer to other people: they just made her a freak in their eyes.
Sometimes she thought of Vassi, and wondered where he was, what he was doing. He hadn't been a strong man, but he'd had a little passion in his soul. More than Ben, more than Pettifer, certainly more than Lyndon. And, she remembered, fondly, he was the only man she'd ever known who had called her Jacqueline. All the rest had manufactured unendearing corruptions of her name:
Jackie, or J., or, in Ben's more irritating moods, Ju-Ju. Only Vassi had called her Jacqueline, plain and simple, accepting, in his formal way, the completeness of her, the totality of her. And when she thought of him, tried to picture how he might return to her, she feared for him.
Vassi's Testimony (part two)
'Of course I searched for her. It's only when you've lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase 'It's a small world'. It isn't. It's a vast, devouring world, especially if you're alone.
