Caedmon’s Song (35 page)

At last he managed to find a foothold in the cliff face just below the edge, but his hands were so badly damaged that all he could do was push himself up with his feet and flail his arms about.
The barbed wire tied him to the edge but his feet pushed him away. Sue stood up, raised the paperweight and hit him on the side of his head. The jolt ran all the way up her arm. Blood filled his
eye. She hit out again, this time catching him over the ear. He screamed and put one hand to the wound. The post broke free of its shallow pit and shot over the cliff side, taking him with it. Sue
knelt right at the edge and saw him twist around in the wire like an animal in a trap before he tore free and plunged.

Far below, the sea lapped and spumed around the rocks at the base of the cliff, and the body, arms and legs whirling, hit them with a thud louder than the breaking waves themselves. Sue could
see him down there, slumped and broken over the sharp dark rocks, where the foaming waves licked at him like the tongues of madmen.

It was done. Sue looked back towards the distant church and thought of the normal, day-to-day world that lay below it in the town. What would she do now that it was over? Should she follow him?
It would be so easy just to relax and let herself slide over the edge to oblivion.

But no. Suicide wasn’t part of her destiny. Her own death had been her stake, what she had risked, but it was not part of the bargain if she won. She had to accept her fate, whatever it
might be: live with the guilt, if such she felt, or pay for her crimes if she was caught. But there was no giving in to suicide. She was free of her burden now, come what may.

She had no idea if the police were close to discovering her identity. Perhaps they were already waiting back at Mrs Cummings’ to arrest her. And then there was Keith McLaren, still in a
coma. What if he woke up and remembered everything? On the other hand, he might have brain damage or amnesia. If so, was it possible that he would spend his days trying to piece together the
fragments of his memory by himself, and, if he succeeded, would he hunt down the woman who had so suddenly and without provocation wrecked his life? She didn’t know. She might have created
another like herself, someone with a bit of the undead in him.

But no matter how bleak some of the possibilities seemed, she felt free at last. More than that, she was Kirsten again. Even imprisonment would be a kind of freedom now. It didn’t really
matter what happened because she had done what had to be done. Now she was free.

Certainly her best bet would be to get out of town and back to Sarah first thing in the morning and destroy anything that might link her to the place. That’s what she would do. Perhaps she
could also tint her hair and make sure she looked like none of the girls who had been in Whitby.

All Kirsten really wanted to do at the moment, she realized, looking towards the church, was crawl into one of those box pews marked FOR STRANGERS ONLY, kneel and offer a prayer of sorts, then
curl up on the green baize and sleep. But the place would be locked up for the night.

As she got to her feet, the paperweight slipped out of her sweaty palm, bounced on the springy grass and fell over the edge. She leaned forward to watch and saw the glass shatter against a rock
in a shower of white powder like a wave breaking. Free of its cage, the rose seemed to drift up on a current of warm air. Its crimson petals opened, pale in the moonlight, then slowly it floated
back down and a departing wave carried it out to sea.

afterword

‘8th September 1987

Coast road, Whitby-Staithes. Rolling farmland, patchwork of hedged fields (cows grazing) light brown after harvest & wheat-coloured barley etc. End abruptly at cliffs,
pinkish strata, sea clear light blue, sun glinting silver on distant ship. Flock of gulls on red-brown field. Clumps of trees in hollows. Cluster of village houses, light stone, red pantile roofs:
“. . . arrived at the small coastal town at 11.15 a.m. in early September, her mind made up.”’

Such were the humble origins of
Caedmon’s Song,
I discover, looking back over my notebook for August 1987, to March 1988. I wrote the book in the late eighties,
then, after my first four Inspector Banks novels. I remember I needed a change; a novel in which the police played a subsidiary role. Ever since reading about the Yorkshire Ripper, I’d had an
idea for a story about someone who had survived a serial killer’s attack setting out for revenge.

The idea lay fallow, as these things often do, until one September day in 1987, when we crested the hill into Whitby, shortly before the above-described trip to Staithes, when the original
opening revealed itself. There lay Whitby, spread out below. The colours seemed somehow brighter and more vibrant than I remembered: the greens and blues of the North Sea, the red pantile roofs.
Then there was the dramatic setting of the lobster-claw harbour and the two opposing hills, one capped with a church and a ruined abbey, the other with Captain Cook’s statue and the massive
jawbone of a whale. I knew immediately that this was where the story had to take place, and that it began with a woman getting off a bus, feeling a little travel-sick, trying the place on for
size.

When I heard that Macmillan planned to publish this novel in 2003, I toyed with the idea of rewriting it and updating it. After all, isn’t it every writer’s dream to get another
chance years later at improving something one wrote in one’s early days? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it just wouldn’t work, that the world has changed so
much since 1987, and that the events in
Caedmon’s Song
couldn’t happen in a world with mobile phones, e-mail, a McDonald’s or Pizza Hut on every corner, and the current
techniques of DNA testing. Genetic fingerprinting existed back then, as Joseph Wambaugh’s
The Blooding
demonstrates very well, but it was still in its infancy. Besides, I was supposed
to be leaving the police behind. Given the advances in forensic science since 1987, it seemed that if I were to update the book for 2003, it would be almost impossible to keep them in the
background. Whitby has changed, too, especially the footpath along the top of the cliffs which plays such an important role in the book.

In the end, I settled for correcting a few minor points, changing a character’s name, getting rid of an obtrusive comment about Margaret Thatcher. That sort of thing. In all other respects
it’s the original novel, now a period piece of sorts, a slice of late twentieth-century history, set in a time when you could smoke anywhere, get bed and breakfast for £9.50 a night and
Crocodile Dundee
was all the rage!