The Twisted Heart (18 page)

‘Hear me out, okay?' Kit bent down into her bag and extracted her notebook. ‘Witnesses testified that a dog barked in Eliza's house the night she died, I think about three in the morning, can't remember, but it came up at the inquest as hinting at time of death. Listen to this letter to
The Times
a few days later. This codger wrote in that, sure, okay, the dog may have barked, but all the same, it must have known the killer. Because,' Kit put her finger under the lines she wanted, ‘quote, “Was the dog bloody? No. How come such a faithful animal was remiss in its duty? Ought we not to have expected to see the animal likewise murdered?”'

‘Forgive me, but what conclusion are you drawing from all this?' said Joe. ‘Even if your old codger thought up his question having read about Bull's-eye's scarlet footprints, that doesn't tell you anything about any influence on Eliza's murderer.'

‘I'm not convincing you this is at all strange?'

He shook his head, then said, ‘I'll tell you the main reason why I'm not convinced. Forget all the discrepancies. Really, it's what the two stories have in common that I think rules out any influence.' Joe had been eating much more slowly than Kit, and only now finished his soup. ‘The main thing that makes Eliza's case sound similar to Nancy's, if you ask me, is that both murders are savage to the point of total derangement. But for that very reason, I can't believe Eliza's killer was half-following a pattern out of a book. I don't know, but to me that just doesn't ring true.'

‘Sorry to have wasted your time,' said Kit, scowling.

‘No need to apologise.'

‘All right, I won't.' She knew she was being childish but felt too cross to contain herself.

‘Look at this another way,' said Joe, trying to appease her, ‘at least it leaves Dickens in the clear, if he didn't spark off a gruesome, real-life murder.'

‘Yes, but you see, that's another thing,' said Kit. ‘He was still interested in Eliza years afterwards, including he asked Charles Field about the case in 1850, over a decade later. I was wondering if that mightn't have been because he felt guilty about it, kind of deal.'

The waiter brought them their pasta. ‘Oh, superb, brilliant,' said Kit. ‘God, I'm going to be stuffed at the end of this.'

‘I notice you're always very polite about food,' said Joe.

‘Polite? You're being polite calling it polite,' she said with a laugh. ‘Appreciative, yes.' A small alarm in her mind was telling her that the evening was about to go wrong; yet, not knowing how or why, she carried right on, eating and talking by turns. ‘I can't be bothered to do things for myself in the kitchen, so I'm always impressed by anyone who likes to cook. My mother's all prefab meals these days. I think it's a big relief to her to have given up. If she cooks an actual cooked dish it leaves this thick smell in our house like fried soap. I find I have bordering on this sentimental thing about it, when I smell that smell after being away.'

‘Kit, I didn't mean to destroy your theory,' said Joe.

‘You'll think I'm crazy,' she replied, ‘but even if you have, for now, I can't promise you I've given up on it.
Orson says—' she regretted mentioning him again, but too late, ‘he says, “I like that you get so enthused”.'

‘Yes, well, I agree with him,' said Joe.

‘Orson is having trouble with the nature of his being or something,' said Kit.

‘I'm with him on that, too.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I, too,' said Joe, ‘am having trouble with the nature of my being or something.'

‘Really?' said Kit. ‘Is it infectious? I ran away when he tried to talk to me about it this morning. I felt bad afterwards, but I was just so bored. I don't mean I'm bored about you,' she added awkwardly.

Joe, who had seemed disenchanted with his food from the start, put his fork down now and held his hand up in surrender.

‘But I mean, that was why he asked me to this party thingamabob,' said Kit, wanting to explain, ‘so he could pour out his woes over a glass. Though why he thinks I can say anything useful, I have no idea. He doesn't think he truly exists here in Oxford. Joe, I still feel, the Eliza case, I can't explain, but there's—I feel there's something I'm not getting that it would be interesting to understand.'

‘Well, I'd be very sorry if you gave up because of anything I said. You know, your eyes shine when you talk about all the details. I don't know any other way to describe it.'

This observation caused Kit to start glowering at him again. ‘This isn't some version of, I don't know, “you're beautiful when you're angry”?' she said.

‘It what?'

‘You're so sweet when you twitter on about your work?'

‘Hardly.' Joe laughed. ‘Kit, what?—you're so sweet when you twitter on about women being clubbed to death, mutilated and having their heads chopped off?'

As she wasn't wholly mollified by this reply, Joe changed tack and asked, ‘Have you tried talking it through with your tutor?'

‘No. No, I ran into him on Wednesday, but he splurted out—splurted?—blurged?—anyway,
poured
out, that he's getting divorced; so luckily he forgot to ask how my work was going. I mean, I don't mean to be callous, but I'm getting quite behind. He said his marriage has gone totally phut. He once characterised his wife to me as being—he said, “She's the sort of woman who stays in touch with all our daughter's ex-boyfriends”.'

‘Ho-hum.'

‘I know, it does sound a bit ho-hum. I can't believe he's been a super-brilliant husband either. Anyway, none of my business; but he was upset, so I just did the being-sympathetic bit, and that was all we talked about. But what am I—? Yes, sorry. You know, I have
definitely
done a shitload of work this week. That's what you asked me, wasn't it, a large amount of food ago. How are you? Aren't you hungry? You've hardly touched that. I feel so much better now I've eaten. Yes, shitloads of work, basically, and not just on Eliza, I don't mean, far from it. Although I have flipped through a lot of incredibly unhelpful
Oliver Twist
articles, believe me.'

‘Is there anything else you want to say about it all? I'm still open to argument.'

Kit put her elbows on the table. ‘Okay, one tiny thing, okay, and then that's it.'

‘So long as you don't tell me you think Dickens himself killed Eliza Grimwood.'

‘Give me a break,' said Kit, ‘I'm not a complete nutter. No, there was this pirate publisher, Edward Lloyd, who plagiarised
Oliver Twist
, instalment by instalment, and sold his version to the public in seventy-nine penny parts renamed
Oliver Twiss
—called it a “literary bantling”, but added changes, improvements to the text can you believe, which doubled its length. So I had a look at it this afternoon, out of curiosity. I don't know what I was after, really. But one of the most peculiar things about it, to me, was that, where Nancy, in
Twist
, more or less signs her own death warrant on London Bridge, right—remember?—when she betrays Fagin's gang to try and save Oliver? Well in Twiss this is altered so that her fate is sealed, not on London Bridge, but on Waterloo Bridge.
Waterloo Bridge?
I mean, don't you think that's weird? I double-checked on a map, and Waterloo Bridge, logistically, is in completely the wrong place for the plot. Nancy needs to get from her room in East London to whichever bridge and back again as fast as possible before Sikes wakes up. Waterloo Bridge is much further away. So why did they make that change in the pirate version?'

‘And what's your answer to this question?'

‘Apart from Waterloo being London's number-one suicide bridge at the time, because it was a toll bridge with little recesses, and was therefore the most private, so it had this reputation as kind of a bridge of ill omen—well, that's the rational theory why. But isn't it like a weird little prophecy?'

Joe shook his head. ‘I'm sure you don't want to hear this,' he said, ‘but sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.'

Kit sighed heavily, finding his rigour oppressive. ‘I have this feeling I can't put into words that if I try hard enough, I'm going to see something else here.'

‘Brute force.'

‘What?'

‘Sorry: a brute-force search,' said Joe. ‘It's a maths term; means working out an answer by going through every possible option, rather than by devising a short cut that will eliminate a proportion of the trial runs.'

‘Oh. Thanks. Well then, I suppose. Although it's not the same, because I'm pretty much compelled to look for evidence anywhere it might be. Although, in a brute-force-search way, perhaps. I have to say, I think I'm scraping the barrel now—or at least, the barrel I know about. Not that I haven't got a thousand other more important things to do. I mean, apart from my thesis intro, and knocking my Conrad chapter on the head, which I've virtually not done any of this week, I've been slaving over a paper I've got to give at the Victorian graduate seminar next Thursday, and my plan was that, even if it's rubbish, I'd at least try to win them over by amusing them all to pieces—but that's a scary option in itself, and I'm finding what I'm saying less and less funny the more I work on it.'

The restaurant was packed, the service slow. Kit assumed that their waiter had decided he could neglect them. They were a couple, after all, and though they weren't any longer eating, they still had wine. He might soon need their table, but he must have calculated that he didn't need their approval for being efficient.

‘I'm sure it won't be rubbish,' said Joe. ‘You're planning to do a comic turn?'

‘I thought it would be good if I could make them laugh.'

‘How do you aim to do that, as a matter of interest? Amputations? Cannibalism?'

‘You know what?
Yes
,' said Kit. ‘You think I'm a maniac? Wrong in the head?'

‘I don't know,' said Joe. ‘What's the paper about?'

She swallowed hard. ‘It's, “A Short History of Sudden Death in the Reign of Queen Victoria”. Because—really, Joe, you've got to admit—in the Victorian era, the opportunities for dying by accident increased beyond belief, which from a literary point of view equals authors having much more choice over how to kill off their characters. If you read Victorian newspapers, the number of whole houses that got blown to smithereens while gas was being installed, or the number of workmen frizzled to death when they were trying to get the country electrified, or the number of people, you wouldn't believe it, killed on the railways, hundreds, thousands, seriously, crushed, or with bits fatally severed, let alone pigs and cows—and then there was sleep-walkers falling out of high windows once the masses were crowded into city tenements; honestly, you could do a whole book on this subject, factories, construction projects. But, yes, for the purposes of surviving my talk, my idea was that the press notices of these disasters can be quite hilarious, and of course, every one of them has a guaranteed superb ending. You didn't answer my question, by the way.'

Joe shook his head uncomprehendingly.

‘How are you?'

There was a long pause, then, rather than answer, he said, ‘What is it with you and violence, Kit?'

She herself paused, before replying lightly, ‘Oh, God, violence—well, what I think about violence, crime, I don't know. My feeling is, that people who have the imagination to do crimes properly should have the imagination not to do them at all. Mostly people do them rather badly. No, that's a stupid thing to say—depending, as ever, on what's meant by “properly”—and, of course, by “crime”.'

A wave of terrible fatigue assailed her; the warmth of the restaurant, her overfull stomach, the wine she had drunk, and the knowledge that her answer had been garbled because she hadn't known what to say.

‘But violence in particular interests you?' Joe asked.

Of course it was hopeless of her not to be able to understand the least particle of what he did, but he seemed so unwilling to talk about himself, unless she had missed something. ‘I wouldn't say that it was a notable feature of my daily life,' she said.

‘It is a feature of mine,' said Joe, and he lifted his right hand up, and showed her the knuckles.

‘What happened?' she asked, a little shocked.

‘I didn't think I could cook for you,' he said, staring at the scabs and bruises. ‘I've been eating with this one,' and he indicated his left.

So he had. She had noticed without thinking about it. ‘What happened?' she said again.

‘Humpty got in a fight last weekend.'

‘You're kidding.'

He wasn't.

‘And you?' she said. The thought that she was having dinner with someone who hit people unsettled her.

‘Let's say I helped extract him.' At the look on her face, he added, ‘I did boxing at school.'

‘Oh. Goodness. Isn't it banned in schools?'

‘Not formally, no.'

‘Oh,' she said. ‘You mean it, though? You actually punched someone?' She peeped at her own knuckles, which she'd scraped doing the somersault, but they were healed again.

Joe put his hand back in his pocket. ‘What I was wondering was, you get something out of it at a distance, yes?—on the page, or the screen, or in old newspapers? You like
clean
-dirty, right?'

‘Have I done something wrong?' she whispered.

‘I'm just asking. I didn't mean to—whatever. I'm just trying to understand you,' said Joe.

‘Well, thanks.' On reflection, Kit added, ‘Maybe I should mention that I find you quite hard to understand, myself.' As he didn't reply to this, she continued, ‘I get caught by what I'm reading, you know, and all the world looks bad to me for a while, even if it's just wasps and starlings and apples and fog and blackberries. I don't know what to do with the bad bits inside my head. It doesn't feel clean in there, definitely not. Did you really, fully slow down and picture to yourself, when you read about Nancy, what it would be like to beat a woman to death with a club while she knelt in front of you; or what it would be like to be the person killed that way? Don't you ever think sometimes that the things inside your head are too violent?—and that smacking something solid would be easy, in a way?'