Listening in the Dusk Read online

  It had been a further shock, of course, when the police (it was the summer vacation by then) had arrived at the house, not, on this first occasion, with a search-warrant; merely about who had been doing what on various nights. Her father, just out of hospital after his first heart-attack, had been away convalescing, and her mother with him; and so the brunt of the questioning had fallen upon the young people at home. Mary remembered, afterwards, that she had wished Julian would be more forthcoming, less sulky and withdrawn in his manner. The police were being perfectly civil at this stage, a routine call, that’s all; they were checking on all the households in the neighbourhood; concentrating, perhaps — though they didn’t say so — on households which included young men in their teens or twenties. This was pure guesswork, at this stage of the investigation, for no definite clues of any sort had emerged as to the probable identity of the assailant.

  This was after the first two shootings. The third one occurred two nights later, and this time the victim, though shot in the chest, had survived, and while recovering had been able to describe the experience to detectives at his bedside. He had been walking along the new, not yet made-up road that led from what had once been Flittermouse Hill (Medley Green Estate, it was now called) towards the town when he had become aware of hasty footsteps behind him, as if someone was hurrying to catch him up. Before he had time to turn round, he experienced what felt like a violent blow on the shoulder. He remembered collapsing on to the ground … A sound of running footsteps … A vague sense of someone speaking … Yes, a man’s voice, a young man … and then had lost consciousness. He had woken up in hospital, several hours later, having undergone an operation to remove the bullet from his ribs, and to learn that he had been the third victim of the Monster of Medley Green, as the unknown person was by now being called.

  Was Mary blinding herself to the hideously obvious that night? It had not seemed so at the time, but looking back she wondered how she could possibly have been deceived by the preposterous story which Julian had blurted out as he raced into the house, just before midnight, his anorak all smeared with blood.

  “Out of the way, Midge — one of my nosebleeds!” he’d gasped as he pushed past her and raced on upstairs to the bathroom.

  “One of my nosebleeds.” As if it was part of a known family pattern that Julian should now and again have nosebleeds.

  But it wasn’t. He’d never had one before — not to Mary’s knowledge — through all the long years of their childhood. But somehow, something deep inside Mary had accepted it — or, rather, had refused to query it; and, amazingly, had still failed to query it even when the news of the new attack took pride of place in all the media the very next morning.

  Another visit from the police. Her father back in hospital again. She had wondered, since, whether he already suspected what she, Mary, ought by now to have suspected — and whether this had hastened his death? He never spoke about it if it was so — but then, neither did she.

  Julian sulky and withdrawn again, answering the police questions — more probing this time — in monosyllables. She wished desperately that he wouldn’t be like that, but somehow she still didn’t suspect anything. After all, he was only eighteen — still a teenager, really — and what teenage boy doesn’t sometimes react to adult questioning with sulks and withdrawal? still, it was bound to give the police a bad impression: and sure enough, when they next interviewed her they asked her a lot of searching questions about her brother as well as about herself. Had he had any special worries lately? Had she noticed any changes in his personality? In his usual habits?

  No, she’d said: and No, and No, and No. And in a way it was true, for the change had not been recent — which surely was what the police were asking about? — but had started more than a year ago. And there had been good reason for it — or so it had seemed to her — for this was the time when they began the destruction of Flittermouse Hill. He hadn’t talked about it much, or even at all, after those first few shattering days; but sometimes she wondered if he’d ever really got over it. It was as if his childhood and youth had been shattered by the bulldozers as surely as the soft springy turf and the primroses that starred the edges of the copse at the foot of the hill.

  “I’ll kill them!” he’d said at the beginning, his eyes bright and harsh with the burning, difficult tears of adolescence. “I will! I’ll kill them!”

  But, of course, plenty of people talk like this in times of stress. No one dreams of taking it seriously. Pointless, certainly, to repeat such a wild and childish threat in the context of serious police inquiry nearly two years later.

  It was after the fifth murder that the question of the diary came up. Someone — was it her father, in hospital once again with what proved to be his last heart-attack — who’d told them? Had he, either innocently, or from a grim sense of civic duty, revealed to them that his son, ever since the age of twelve, had kept a diary? A nature-diary it had been to begin with, full of data about Pimpernels, and Enchanter’s Nightshade; a first sighting of a Bee Orchis, of a Purple Gromwell, with little sketch-maps about where to look for them among the brambles and short turf of the chalky slopes or alongside the cool damp ditches that flanked the copses of silver birch. Butterflies, too, sightings of Yellow Brimstones and Chalk Hill Blues. And the bats, of course. Pages and pages about the bats.

  Later, though, as he became thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, the diary became more personal, more secret. Even his sister wasn’t allowed to read it any more. Still, she knew the special place where he kept it, and when the police asked her about it, some instinct — surely, by now, to be called suspicion? — warned her to deny all knowledge of it. By the time they came with their search-warrant, she had already made sure it was no longer in the house. She had packed it carefully in a suitcase and deposited it in the Left Luggage Office of a main-line station. It couldn’t stay there for ever, of course; after three months it could come under suspicion — maybe in connection with some other murder hunt altogether. After three months, she would have to find some other hiding-place; but three months was a long time, and at least for that period it would be out of trouble.

  Trouble? What trouble? Here she was, taking all these precautions, suppressing evidence, obstructing the police in the course of their duty, and all without any clear sense of why she was doing it. Was it to protect Julian? But she hadn’t, as yet, admitted to herself that her brother needed any protection; hadn’t, in her heart of hearts, admitted that any of it was really happening. It was only on the day they arrested him — no, the day after — that she realised just what it is that makes something really have happened; it’s other people knowing about it.

  Other people! Other people in their millions and their billions all over the world. Every newspaper, every TV screen, to the ends of the earth, were filled with his enormous face, his huge black name, and his terrible deeds. Between them, the TV and the newspapers were turning him, hour by hour, into a monster of evil. With their headlines, with their films and photographs, they were moulding him into a monster as purposefully and as inexorably as a sculptor moulds a lump of clay in accordance with his vision.

  They were doing another moulding job, too, at the same time, working away at it on the side-lines: Sister of the Monster.

  Think about it. Yesterday, a bright intelligent girl, attractive, with lots of friends, doing well at college: today a totally new, totally unrecognisable creature, Sister of the Monster. Her father had died that very night, just before dawn, just in time to not hear the seven o’clock news; just in time to escape changing from himself into Father of the Monster. Well, she prayed that it was just in time. The change from life to death was surely a lesser thing.

  For Mary, there had been no such escape. Young, strong, healthy, her body would not dream of dying; it would not even collapse with illness, or anaesthetise her with a nervous breakdown. The onslaught of reporters, film crews, psychiatric social workers, friends, strangers, cameramen came at her in a single concerted at
tack, which nothing could withstand. For although the voices were various, ranging from heights of compassion to depths of revulsion, they all actually spoke in unison, conveying the same message:

  “You will never be a normal person, ever again.”

  Chapter 17

  During her years of teaching Alice had, of course, found herself at times the recipient of confidences from one or another of her pupils, and intractable though the problems could sometimes seem, she had always prided herself on being able to find something helpful or encouraging to say: some suggestion for a possible course of action; an idea, perhaps, for breaking a vicious circle; some new angle from which to view an impasse; a touch of humour, even, to put the problem more in proportion.

  But among all the troubles that had been laid before her, there had never been anything like this. Her repertoire of appropriate responses was silenced. To a trouble of these dimensions nothing you could possibly say would be adequate; and yet you must say something. And quickly. A pause for thought, a few moments silence, would come across as embarrassed revulsion, and could close up the floodgates of confidences for ever. It was four o’clock in the morning, the girl’s white exhausted face poised above her thin shoulders looked almost middle-aged under the harsh ceiling light. Maybe it would have been better, less depressing, to have created a softer illumination for their vigil by lighting the candles; the bright, waiting candles newly purchased for a festive occasion which now could never be. But how heartless this could have seemed! Candles! There was no way of getting it right; none at all.

  How thin she looked, poor child, in this cruel light, bones sticking up everywhere! How come she hadn’t really noticed this before? And suddenly, without thinking about it at all, Alice found herself speaking, firmly and decisively.

  “I’ve got some bacon,” she said, “downstairs in the fridge. I know it’s early, but let’s have some breakfast. With coffee. And toast.”

  “But … But …” A suggestion from such an unexpected angle had obviously given Mary a jolt. “I don’t eat breakfast,” was all she could come up with.

  “I know you don’t. And you don’t have lunch, either. Or any supper to speak of — Hetty’s been worrying about it for weeks. What are you trying to do? How is starving yourself going to help? Or is that what you’re trying to do? Literally to starve yourself? It won’t work, you know, it takes weeks and weeks to get anywhere remotely like dying, and even then —”

  “I’m not trying to starve myself!” Mary protested. “I was just trying to get thin so that I wouldn’t be so recognisable — I used to be quite plump, you know, and it makes a lot of difference to your looks. That’s the important thing, Alice, that no one shall ever, ever recognise me, as long as I live. I’ve cut my hair, I’ve changed my name. I’ve come to live in this grotty place, I’ve got thin and hideous — what more can I do? What can I?”

  Well, what could she? What did families do, in this sort of terrible situation? You didn’t hear much about it, really, in the news reports. About the wives and girlfriends, yes — but then that was different. These might indeed heroically insist on standing by the evil-doer through thick and thin; but all the time they had the option of not; of changing their minds, of ditching him, of shaking the past off completely, freeing themselves from it, and getting on with their lives; sooner or later becoming someone else’s wife or lover.

  But you couldn’t opt for being someone else’s sister. This was a blood tie which nothing could sever, not as long as you lived. Was Mary’s solution perhaps the only possible one? To cut yourself off from everyone and everything you had ever known? To exile yourself into a world of lies, lie upon lie, a vast top-heavy structure of falsehood, for ever needing to be shored-up, for ever needing emergency repairs and alterations in panic response to this or that unforeseen occurrence in the outside world? Such tiny, everyday things would be able to set the whole contraption rocking; a chance encounter with a former acquaintance; a careless gap or inconsistency in the fictional life-story?

  And yet, if this wasn’t the answer — then what was? What could one say? And who was Alice to say it? It was Mary, not Alice, who was the expert in this grim speciality. How can one dare to give advice to someone enduring an ordeal which one has never faced, and never will have to face? Oh, there is always something you can say to people in appalling trouble: like, “Be thankful it’s not both legs,” or, “Lucky you’re not going to be deaf as well.” That sort of thing.

  Alice drew deep breath.

  “Come on,” she said. “Breakfast!” and reached out a hand to pull the girl to her feet.

  “Oh …!” Mary pulled away, but seemed bewildered rather than antagonistic. “I can’t, you know, Alice, I really can’t. It’s not that I’m still trying to get any thinner, it’s that I can’t eat now. I really can’t. My stomach’s shrunk up, or something. Like, yesterday Hetty was trying to get me to eat one of her rock-cakes, and I did try, just to please her. I’d had nothing all day, and they’re not bad, you know, those cakes of hers. But I couldn’t get it down, honestly, Alice, I just couldn’t. My throat just wouldn’t swallow it …”

  “Bacon’s different,” declared Alice authoritatively. “Come on. When you smell it, sizzling away, in the pan, and fried bread too, done in really hot fat so that it’s all crisp and golden …”

  It worked — at least to the extent that Mary consumed not just one rasher, but two, as well as a square of fried bread and a finger of toast. She even managed a watery smile when Hengist marched in, quite noisily as he sometimes did when he knew it wasn’t a proper mealtime, and staked out his claim to some sort of share of whatever was going at this unaccustomed hour. No, not just rinds, for heaven’s sake, a bit of proper bacon if you don’t mind, and not all fat, either …

  And then milk, of course. He established himself alongside his usual saucer, front paws neatly together, and stared at them, without blinking.

  “Do tell me, Mary,” Alice said, going to the fridge. “You’ve been here longer than I have, which of these milks is it all right to give to Hengist? There’s so many of them, some with labels and some not, whose are they all? This one called ‘Yesterday Only’, for instance … Who on earth?”

  “Oh, that’s Hetty,” Mary explained. She laughed a little, and Alice secretly rejoiced that her ploy of raising a trivial domestic problem was turning out more than half-way successful; it was the first time ever that she had heard Mary laugh. There was colour in her cheeks; she was looking, for a moment, like any other twenty-year-old. “It’s history really,” she was explaining. “Once upon a time a note was left out for the milkman saying ‘Yesterday only two pints were delivered, please leave extra today’ — something like that. Most of the message got rained away, but Hetty kept what was left because she’d had such a lot of trouble threading the rubber band through it to attach it to the bottle, it seemed a shame to waste it, so she kept it for hers. It had to be hers, she said, because anyone else would make a fuss, having a label like that.”

  “Oh.” Alice continued her researches. “And so what’s this ‘HH’ one? I’ve been taking for granted it must be Hetty. ‘Hetty Harman’, you know —”

  “Oh no,” said Mary. “That’s Hengist’s. You see, there used to be Horsa, too, until he disappeared, and Hetty’s keeping it like this just in case he comes back.” She laughed again. “Do you remember the rhyme, Alice — did they have it when you were at school?

  ‘Hengist was coarser than Horsa

  And Horsa was awfully coarse!’

  I forget how it goes on, something about ‘And Horsa ate peas with a knife!’ I remember Julian saying …”

  And suddenly, without warning, she was in floods of tears. Rushing out of the room and up the stairs. Before Alice had thought what to do, the distant door had slammed.

  To interfere? Or to leave the girl to the solitude she seemed so urgently to be seeking? By the time she had decided on interfering, several minutes had passed. Pushing open Mary’s door — for
once it was not barricaded — she saw, to her relief, that the girl was already asleep. Sound asleep, dead asleep, her face rosy and untroubled in deep unconsciousness, like a tired child.

  And no wonder, after the stress, and the misery, and the all-night vigil. Alice felt quite envious, she wished that she, too, might settle down to a day’s sleeping, but this could not be. The day that was to dawn in a couple of hours’ time was Saturday, the day when both her pupils were due to come for their respective lessons, and there was quite a lot of preparation that she must do.

  On top of which, she was going to have to explain to Brian that the party must be cancelled, at least for the time being. The explanation was going to be difficult, because Mary had sworn her to secrecy, adding, in addition:

  “Whatever happens, Alice, don’t let Brian find out! Don’t let him suspect anything! Promise me, Alice, that you won’t let him suspect a thing!”

  Chapter 18

  Cyril arrived at Alice’s for his Greek lesson slightly late and in a state of extraordinary euphoria. Funny, that, because he hadn’t actually succeeded in the descent from step eleven, which was where he was at now. In fact, he had failed quite dramatically — his elbow was still hurting fairly badly from this failure. The feeling of triumph wasn’t to do with success, then it must be to do with having had a go; and as he and Alice began to work their way through Cyrus’ various tribulations and set-backs on his way towards supreme power, it occurred to Cyril that he and the Great King were linked by something more than the common derivation of their names. Ascending the throne of the mighty Persian Empire to the cheers of your victorious army … Ascending to step eleven behind the garages of Park Rise Estate to the cheers (whispered) of your special gang — it was the same thing really. People didn’t understand this sort of thing nowadays, because “glory” had become a bad word, worse than “fuck”; but Cyrus would have understood. As a child, he’d gloried in excelling at boys’ games — they’d recently been reading a splendid chapter about this. He’d have taken part in the Bike Run like a shot, Cyrus would, if he’d happened to have been born nowadays instead of two and a half thousand years ago. And would have won it hands down, too, he’d have been at step eighteen already, beating even Winston. But of course, none of this, nowadays, would lead to becoming a Great King. In order to attain power nowadays, he’d have to start by getting into local politics and being for or against things like Housing Subsidies …