Caedmon’s Song (24 page)

KIRSTEN

‘You realize it might take several sessions,’ said Laura Henderson, brushing some ash off her white coat, ‘and even then there’s no
guarantee?’

Kirsten nodded. ‘But you can do it?’

‘Yes, I can do it. About ten per cent of people aren’t susceptible to hypnosis, but I don’t think we’ll have much trouble with you. You’re bright, and you’ve
got plenty of imagination. What did Superintendent Elswick say?’

Kirsten shrugged. ‘Nothing much. Just asked me if I’d give it a try.’

Laura leaned forward. ‘Look, Kirsten,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s on your mind, but I sense some hostility. I want to remind you that what goes on between us in
this office is confidential. I don’t want you thinking that I’m somehow just an extension of the police. Naturally, they’re keeping tabs on you, and when they found out you were
seeing me they made enquiries. I want you to know, though, that I haven’t told them anything at all about our sessions, and nor would I, without your permission.’

‘I believe you,’ Kirsten said. ‘Besides, there’s been nothing to tell, has there?’

‘Hypnosis might change that. Do you still trust me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And even if we do come up with something, even if the man told you his name for some reason, and you remember it, none of what we discover will be of any legal use.’

‘I know that. Superintendent Elswick just said that I might remember something that would help them catch him.’

‘Right,’ Laura said, relaxing again. ‘I just don’t want you to expect too much, that’s all – either from the hypnotherapy or from the police.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t. Are you going to get your watch out and swing it in front of my eyes?’

‘Have you ever been hypnotized before?’

‘Never.’

Laura grinned. ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t carry a pocket watch. I’m not going to make hand passes at you, either. And my eyes won’t suddenly start to glow bright
red. You do need something to fix your attention on, true, but I think this’ll do fine.’ She picked up the heavy glass paperweight from on top of a pile of correspondence. Inside,
caught in the glass globe, was what looked like a dark green tangle of seaweed and fronds. ‘Do you want to start now?’

Kirsten nodded. Laura got up and closed the blinds on the grey afternoon so that the only light left shone from a shaded desk lamp. Then she took off her white coat and hung it on the stand.

‘First of all,’ she said, ‘I want you to relax. Loosen your belt if it’s too tight. It’s important to feel as comfortable as possible physically. Okay?’

Kirsten shifted in her chair and tried to relax all her muscles the way she had done in yoga classes at university.

‘Now I want you to look at that globe, concentrate, stare into it. Stay relaxed and just listen to me.’

And she started to talk, general stuff about feeling at ease, heavy, sleepy. Kirsten stared into the globe and saw a whole underwater world. The way the light caught the glass, the green fronds
seemed to be swaying to and fro very slowly, as if they really were seaweed at the bottom of the sea, weighed down by so much pressure.

When Laura said, ‘Your eyelids are heavy,’ they were. Kirsten closed her eyes and felt suspended between waking and sleep. She could hear a distant buzzing in her ears, like bees in
the garden one childhood summer. The soft voice went on, taking her deeper. Finally, they went back to that night last June. ‘You’re leaving the party, Kirsten, you’re walking out
into the street . . .’

And she was. Again it was that muggy night, so vivid that she really felt as if she was there. She entered the park, aware of the soft tarmac path yielding under her trainers, the amber street
lights on the main road, the sound of an occasional car passing by. And she could almost recapture the feelings, too, that sense of an ending, the sadness of everyone going his or her own way after
what seemed so long together. A dog barked. Kirsten looked up. The stars were fat and blurred, almost butter-coloured, but she couldn’t find the moon.

She was at the centre of the park now, and she could see haloed street lights on the bordering roads. She felt a sudden impulse to sit on the lion. The grass swished under her feet as she walked
over and touched the warm stone of the mane. Then she mounted it and felt silly but happy, like a little girl again. She thought of cockatoos, monkeys, insects and snakes, then she threw her head
back to look for the moon again, and felt herself choking.

Laura’s voice cut through the panic, steady and calm, but Kirsten was still struggling for breath as she tried to drag herself out of the trance. She could feel the calloused hands with
their stubby fingers over her mouth, and she was being turned around, pulled off the lion’s back onto the warm grass. The world went dark and she couldn’t breathe. The cloud in her mind
hardened and gleamed like jet, blotting everything out. She felt her back pushed hard against the grass, a great weight on her chest, then she burst up to the surface, gasping for air, and Laura
reached forward to hold her hand.

‘You’re all right,’ Laura said. ‘It’s over. Take a deep breath . . . another . . . That’s right.’

Kirsten glanced around her, terrified, and found she was back in the familiar office with its glass-enclosed bookcases, filing cabinets, grinning skull and old hat stand.

‘Will you open the blinds?’ she asked, putting a hand to her throat and rubbing, ‘I feel like I’m at the bottom of the sea.’ She was still gulping for breath.

Laura pulled the blinds up, and Kirsten walked over to look out hungrily on the twilit city. She could see the river below, a slate mirror, and the people walking home from work. It was just
after five o’clock and the street lights had come on all over the city. She stood there taking in the ordinariness of the scene and breathed deeply for a couple of minutes. Then she sat down
opposite Laura again.

‘I could do with a drink,’ she said.

‘Of course.’ Laura fetched the Scotch from the cabinet, poured them each a shot, and offered her a cigarette. ‘Are you all right now?’

‘Better, yes. It was just so . . . so
vivid.
I felt as if I was really living through it all again. I didn’t expect it to be as real as that.’

‘You’re a very imaginative woman, Kirsten. It’s bound to be that way for you. Did you learn anything?’

Kirsten shook her head. ‘No, it all went black when he turned me around and dragged me to the ground.’

‘He did that?’

‘Yes, of course he did.’

Laura tapped a column of ash into the tin ashtray. ‘That’s not what you said before.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you remember? Before, you could only remember up to the point of the hand coming from behind. You said nothing about being dragged down.’

Kirsten frowned. ‘But that’s what must have happened, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but this time you actually relived it.’

It was true. Kirsten had remembered the sensation of falling, or of being pushed, onto her back on the ground, and the soft warmth of the grass as it tickled the nape of her neck . . . then the
darkness, the weight. ‘I didn’t see anything, though,’ she said.

‘Perhaps not. I told you this might take several sessions. The point is that you’ve made progress. You remembered something you didn’t remember before, something you’d
buried. It might not be much, and it might not tell you anything, but at least it proves that you can do it, you
can
remember.’

‘There’s something else, too,’ Kirsten said, reaching for her Scotch. ‘It’s true that I didn’t see anything new this time, but you’re right, I did get
further than I’ve been before. It’s not just images, visual memories, but there are feelings, too, that come back, aren’t there?’

‘What kind of feelings do you mean? Fear? Pain?’

‘Yes, but not just that. Intuitions, inklings . . . it’s hard to describe.’

‘Try.’

‘Well, what I felt was that I
did
see his face. I don’t mean now, today, but when it happened. I know I saw him, but I’m still blocking the memory. And there was
something else as well. I don’t know what it was, but there was definitely something else about him. It was almost there, like a name on the tip of your tongue, but I resisted. I
couldn’t breathe, and it was so dark I just had to come out.’

‘Do you want to carry on?’ Laura asked, offering the bottle again. ‘You don’t have to. Nobody can make you. You know how painful it can be.’

Kirsten tossed back the last of her Scotch and held her glass out. The experience had terrified her, true, but it had also given her something she hadn’t felt before: a resolve, a sense of
purpose. Her cold hatred had crystallized into a desire to see her attacker. It was all connected, in some strange way, with the dark cloud that weighed down her mind.

When she finally spoke, her eyes were shining and her voice sounded strong and sure. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do want to carry on, whatever happens. I want to know who did this
to me. I want to see his face.’

SUSAN

The newspapers had nothing much to report the next morning. Sue sat in her new cafe on Church Street, drinking coffee to get rid of the taste of Mrs Cummings’s tea. She
knew she would be better off not drinking the vile brew in the first place, but she needed something hot and bitter to wake her up. It was drizzling outside, and the cafe was full of miserable
tourists keeping an eye on the weather, spinning out a pot of tea and a slice of gateau until the rain stopped and they could venture out again.

Sue hadn’t slept well. She had already been awake when the seagulls started at a quarter to four. Even under the blankets and the bedspread, she had been trembling with delayed shock at
what she had done to Keith McLaren. She could still see his stunned, innocent face, the blood pouring over his tanned cheek. She told herself he was just like the rest, like all men, but she still
couldn’t help hating herself for what she had been forced to do.

When she came to analyse her actions, it was mostly the way she had deliberately set up the situation that disgusted her. Because she didn’t see herself as a coldblooded killer, she had
lured Keith into the woods and forced him to put her in a position from which she could strike out in self-righteous anger. In a way, it had been as cold-blooded as any execution; she had just
needed to get herself excited enough to kill, and to that end she had seduced Keith, seduced him to death. There was a perverse logic in that somewhere that made even Sue twist her lower lip in the
semblance of a smile the next morning, but the night had been dreadful, full of self-loathing, recrimination, loss of nerve. Even the talisman and the litany of victims had offered scant comfort in
the small hours.

She had also worried. As it happens when you lie awake during those dreadful hours of the not quite morning with something on your mind, one fear leads directly to another. The disturbed mind
seems to toss up terrors with the prolific abandon of a tempestuous ocean. By killing Keith, she had more than doubled her chances of getting caught before she finished what she had set out to do.
With two murders to investigate, the police would surely spot the similarities and start stepping up their search. Somebody might have seen her with Keith in Staithes, Port Mulgrave or Hinderwell,
and then someone else might remember seeing her with Grimley outside the Lucky Fisherman. Her only hope was that Keith’s body would remain undiscovered in the woods until she had finished her
task, and that was what she prayed for as she tossed and turned and finally slipped into an uneasy sleep, lulled by the cacophonous requiem of the gulls.

The coffee and cigarette helped her wake up. There was nothing in the nationals about the Student Slasher, but according to the local paper, the police were now certain that Jack Grimley had
been murdered. Detective Inspector Cromer said that they were looking into his past for anyone who might have a grudge against him, and they still wanted to know if anyone had seen him after he
left the Lucky Fisherman on the night of his death. Clearly no one had come forward so far. Sue remembered that night. She was sure nobody had noticed them, and once they had gone down to the beach
and the cave, no one had even known they were there.

Sue’s hands shook a little as she combed the rest of the paper for news of Keith’s body. Thank God, there was nothing; they clearly hadn’t found him yet. But she would still
have to move quickly. With the police stepping up their search and Keith’s body lying out in the woods for anyone to find, time was no longer on her side.

She knew what she had to do next, but it was still too early in the day. A short distance inland, on the eastern edge of town by the River Esk, stood a factory complex. There, much of the
locally caught fish was cleaned, filleted and otherwise processed for resale. Some of it was frozen. The factory employed about a hundred and fifty workers, an even mix of men and women. If the
person she was looking for was not a fisherman but was still connected with the industry, that had to be the place to look. She was thinking much more clearly now after the mistake with Jack
Grimley.

Even though she knew where to look, she still wasn’t sure how to go about it. She could hardly hang about outside the factory gates, check everyone’s appearance and ask all likely
suspects to say a few words. But what else could she do but watch? She had thought of applying for a job there to get her foot in the door, but that would raise questions of identification,
references and National Insurance stamps. She couldn’t afford that. Another alternative was to find out if the workers had a favourite pub. Whatever she decided, she would have to start with
hanging around the place at five o’clock, when the workers left for the day. Then she could take it from there.

Much as she wanted to, she
couldn’t
rush things. The plan left so much time on her hands, and time was a gift to the enemy. Also, today was not the kind of day for sitting on the
beach reading, and her room at Mrs Cummings’s was far too depressing to spend a whole day in. She had the perennial problem of the English person at the seaside: what to do on a rainy day.
She could always look for a cinema that showed afternoon matinees, she thought, or spend her time and money on the one-armed bandits in an amusement arcade. Then there were the Museum and Art
Gallery, and Captain Cook’s house. There would also be bingo, of course, last resort for the truly desperate.