The First Cut

The rush of thoughts lifted Martha’s spirits. It proved that her mind was working clearly again and that she could harden herself against experience, as she had to. When she looked back on what she had done the other night, keeping the grotesque images at bay, she saw that there was good in it, too. It hadn’t really been a wasted effort at all. If she looked at it from a positive viewpoint, she could see killing Grimley as a kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing. A horrible thought, perhaps, but at least now she knew she could go through with it. Grimley’s murder had also been an initiation of a kind, a baptism in blood. She had killed once; therefore, she could kill again. Only next time, she thought, fingering the paperweight in her holdall, she would be certain to get it right.

26 Kirsten

Kirsten remembered how she used to love the gossamer light in the woods, green and silver filaments dancing in the leaves, and the way it shot through gaps in the foliage here and there and lit up clumps of bluebells or tiny forget-me-nots by the brook, making them seem like still-life paintings rather than living, growing plants.

Today, though, she felt no elation as she trudged along the winding path under the high trees. After two days of hiding in her room, she had made the effort to go out-more for her parents’ sake than for her own. Her father was begi

And it had worked. As soon as she had come downstairs the previous evening, they had cheered up, offered her a drink and sat companionably watching television with her. That morning, her father had returned to work, albeit reluctantly, and her mother had said she was going to Wells to do some shopping, as Bath was getting far too shabby and touristy of late.

But nature did nothing for Kirsten. As she walked, she remembered a passage from Coleridge’s “Dejection” ode:

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief.

Which finds no natural outlet, no relief.

In word, or sigh, or tear.

Looking at the flowers in the light, she felt for Coleridge when he wrote, “I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!…I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” Too true, Kirsten thought. The light that danced among the leaves could give her nothing, and her i

There was no point going on. About halfway along her usual route, she turned around and headed back home. Her room was the best place to be, and the house would be quiet with everyone out. Maybe in a few weeks the emptiness and the pain would go away and she would find herself back to normal. Already, though, she was finding it hard to remember what normal was.

Two black and white cows watched her with their big mournful eyes as she crossed the narrow stretch of grass between the woods and the back gate of the house. Her head still ached, and the depression suddenly gripped her more tightly than before.

Back in the house, she wandered aimlessly from room to room for a while, thought of making a sandwich, then decided she wasn’t hungry. Getting drunk seemed like a good idea at first, but she had an even better one.

First she took a plastic bag from the cupboard under the stairs, then went up to the bathroom and opened the cabinet. Inside were the usual things: aspirin, antihistamine, antacid tablets, cold capsules, cough medicine and some old prescription antibiotics. Leaving only the cough mixture, she emptied the rest into the bag.

Next she crept into her parents’ room. They kept their various pills in the top drawer of the bedside dresser. She took out her mother’s tranquillizers and Mogadons and her father’s blood-pressure tablets and poured them all into the plastic bag too.

In her own room, she opened her shoulder bag and found the prescription analgesic the doctor had given her for her pain. It was the same bag she’d been carrying the night of the attack, and she realized that she had never really wondered what had happened to it before. The police must have been through it, then had probably returned it to her room at the hospital while she was still unconscious. Emptying it on her bed, she found half a month’s supply of birth-control pills still left. Smiling at the irony, she added them to her bagful and carried the lot back downstairs.

The living room was a huge split-level affair. At the front was a bay window that looked out on the lawn, the honeysuckle, the rose beds and the High Street beyond the white fence; at the back, French windows opened out onto the large garden, with its central copper beech, more flower beds and a croquet lawn. Beyond that was the woods. Kirsten opened the windows to let the sun slant in and sat on the carpet in its rays. She had taken a bottle of her father’s best whisky from the cocktail cabinet-Glen-where-am-I, he always called it-and set it down beside her.

She picked up the plastic bag and poured the collection of pills onto the carpet in front of her. They were all the colors of the rainbow, and more besides: blue, green, red, white, yellow, pink, orange. Then she picked a few up, trying to get a nice selection of colors in her palm, swallowed them, and washed them down with a belt of Scotch straight from the bottle.

It was idyllic, sitting cross-legged there in the honeyed sunlight as the bees droned from flower to flower outside the French windows. Kirsten hadn’t eaten all day, and she soon began to feel light-headed-light except for the dark cloud, which was far more dense than possible for something so small. At least it was small today. Sometimes it swelled up like a balloon, but today it was a nasty black marble. If she held it in her hand, she thought, it would probably burst right through her flesh with its weight.

A red one, a blue one, a yellow one, and a gulp of fiery whisky. So it went on; the level in the bottle dropped and the pile of pills on the tan carpet diminished handful by handful. Soon, Kirsten’s head was swimming. Specks of light danced behind her closed eyes. When she opened them and looked out onto the sunlit garden again, she could have sworn it was snowing out there.

27 Martha

After Martha got off the bus at the station near Valley Bridge Road in Scarborough at about one o’clock in the afternoon, the first thing she did was grab a ham and cheese sandwich and a half-pint of lager and lime in the nearest pub, a quiet, run-down place with sticky tables.

She felt much calmer than she had earlier in the day. The news had hit her so hard she had almost given up, but in the end it had only strengthened her resolve. She couldn’t go back without finishing her business on the coast. But now she knew that her precious instinct wasn’t infallible, she would have to be much more certain the next time. How she could find proof beyond what she remembered of his appearance and voice, she didn’t know. Perhaps she would have to lure him on and confront him. When Grimley had said he didn’t remember her, he had been telling the truth. The real killer most likely would remember her, and if she could get him to admit to that, then she would be sure. She didn’t want to leave a string of bodies behind her before she got the right one. She shivered at the thought of turning into the kind of monster she was out to destroy.