The Lake of Darkness (12 page)

“Give me that,” Finn said.

“What d’you want it for?”

“Just to try something out.”

She handed it to him and turned her back to look for her rings, the wedding band and the engagement ring, which each night she took off and dropped into a glass dish on the mantelpiece. Finn raised the poker and struck her on the back of the head. She made a terrible sound, an unnerving, groaning wail. He struck her again and again until she was silent and lying in a big, huddled, bloody heap. He let the poker fall and turned round slowly and saw Lena standing in the doorway.

Lena was trembling at the sight of the blood. Her teeth were chattering and she kept making little whimpering whistling sounds. But she took hold of him with her shaking hands and made him wash himself, and she took away his pyjama trousers and his vest, which were all he had been wearing, and stuffed them into the stove among the glowing nuggets of coke. She washed the poker herself. She made Finn put on clean pyjamas and get into bed and feign sleep and then she went out and got the people next door to phone the police. When they came Finn was really asleep. He was never even suspected.

It pushed Lena over the edge of sanity. She had been teetering there for long enough. “Spontaneous schizophrenia” was what Finn heard a doctor say. That was in the hospital where they had taken her after she had been found going into butchers’ shops and crying out that they sold human flesh. She went into the shops and then she walked into the
Archway Road and lay down in the middle of the road and cried out to the motorists to kill her.

And they hadn’t got the house after all. There was no will, so it went to Brenda who let them go on living there for just six months. Finn never went back to school after Queenie died, and in the depths of the winter after his sixteenth birthday they moved into Lord Arthur Road, she into her top floor warren, he into this room.

He stood inside the door, listening to the ascending steps and to Mr. Bradley’s thin broken voice croaking over and over, “God bless your kind heart, my darling, God bless your kind heart.” After a while Finn went down to the street where he phoned Kaiafas at home from the call box on the corner of Somerset Grove. He needed employment, he hadn’t done a job of work since patching up the Frazers’ bay.

Kaiafas suggested a meeting at Jack Straw’s Castle. That was half-way between their homes, he said, and he coughed piteously into the phone. The meeting was for a long way ahead, two days after Christmas, but Finn couldn’t argue, for Kaiafas claimed still to be bed-bound.

The air was charged with frost and the melted snow had frozen again when he went off to Hampstead to keep his date with Kaiafas. Lena wasn’t yet back from some trip she had gone on with Mrs. Gogarty. There was a waxing moon that hung up over Highbury, greenish-white in a fuzz of mist, and a fine snow was falling, tiny hard pellets of snow that burned when they touched the skin. Up on the Heath, the highest you could get above London and still be in it, an east wind was blowing and the broken and refrozen ice on the Whitestone Pond made it look like a shallow quarry of granite.

The saloon bar in Jack Straw’s was half empty. Finn sat down to wait for Kaiafas. He wasn’t going to buy himself a drink, wasting money for form’s sake. There was only one
person in there that he knew and then only by sight. This was the
Post
reporter, a dark man as thin as himself with black hair and a red mouth, whom Finn had often seen when he had been conducting a one-man investigation into stories of maltreatment and terrorisation of tenants in Lord Arthur Road. The reporter hadn’t got very far. The people he interviewed didn’t think it worth their while to talk to the police, let alone a newspaper.

Finn watched him. He was talking to a pompous-looking fat man, writing something in a notebook, stubbing out a cigarette. Finn concentrated on him and tried by the power of thought to make him light another cigarette. What hadn’t worked on the woman with the iron worked immediately on the reporter. Finn felt pleased with himself. Then Kaiafas came in. Kaiafas had a wrinkled, seamed face like an old leather bag and eyes like muscatels. When out for the evening he always wore pale-coloured suits of some smooth cloth with a glistening sheen to it. Tonight the suit was silvery-blue, but Kaiafas had a black sheepskin coat over it with a black fur collar into which he huddled his paler-than-usual face.

“What will you drink, Feen?”

“Pineapple juice,” said Finn. “The Britvic.”

Kaiafas began to talk of Anne Blake as if Finn had had nothing to do with her death, as if indeed he might not know of her death, but he did so with numerous nudges and winks.

“The rent she pay me, Feen, she could afford have a car, but no, she must go walking in these lonesome places, in the dark. So here we have the result.” Kaiafas had a way of wagging a finger at whomsoever might be his companion. “She have some good furniture. Antiques. Her sister come and take them all away.” He sounded regretful.

“Well, well,” said Finn.

Kaiafas nudged him. “An ill wind that blows nobody no good, eh?” He chortled a little which made him cough. Finn
didn’t ask him how he was, it wasn’t the kind of question he ever asked of anyone. “Another one of those pineapples?” said Kaiafas.

Finn nodded.

“With a drop of vodka this time, no?”

“No,” said Finn. “You know I don’t drink.”

“So. Now how about you do a nice decorating job for me, Feen? Paint out the house, do the rewire, and put down a nice bit of carpet I got fall off the back of a lorry?”

Finn said he would and drank his second pineapple juice. They talked about it for a while and then Finn left. In Lord Arthur Road he parked the van in the same troughs of frozen grey snow from which he had taken it out. As soon as he entered the house, he knew there was something wrong, he could smell it. He went upstairs in the manner of an animal that keeps climbing though it knows there may be a trap or a predator at the top.

Half-way up the flight between his room and Lena’s Mrs. Gogarty was waiting for him. She was bending over the banisters so that he saw her white moon face searching for him, hovering over the deep stairwell, before he reached his own floor. He came on more quickly, and Mrs. Gogarty clutched him, holding fistfulls of his clothes. Her face worked, her voice was a croak, and she could hardly speak. Mrs. Gogarty was afraid of almost everything the natural world held, of enclosed places and open spaces, of spiders and mice and cats, of crowds, of loneliness, of sudden noise, of silence, but she was rather less afraid of insanity than most people are. She had seen so much of it. As they came to the door of Lena’s room he managed to get the story out of her.

She and Lena had been to a sale and exchange clothes market in Hampstead, in Fleet Road, and coming away from it to catch a bus, had seen a notice attached to a lamppost which had frightened Lena. Finn wanted to know what sort of a notice and Mrs. Gogarty could only say over and
over, “The murder, the murder,” but that was enough to make all clear to him. Lena had seen one of the police notices enquiring for information leading to the arrest of the Parliament Hill Fields murderer. No doubt they were posted up all over the area between Hampstead Heath and Gospel Oak stations.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“She shouted out you’d, done it. ‘Him?’ I said. ‘Your lovely boy?’ But words are wind. There weren’t so many people, thank God. A taxi came, I got a taxi, but I don’t know how I got her in it. I had to hold on to her in the taxi. She’s little but she’s strong when she’s like that.”

“Where is she now?”

“In there,” said Mrs. Gogarty, trembling. “Crouched down like a tiger. She said you’d, done the murder and then she said not to send her away. I knew what that meant, I promised not
that.”

Finn said, “Wait a minute,” and went down and into his own room. From the back of the bookshelf, behind
Beelzebub’s Tales
he took a glass jar that contained his hypodermic and his ampoules of chlorpromazine. Give her a big dose, fifty milligrams-or seventy-five? Finn had no friends, but he had acquaintances who could get him anything. Mrs. Gogarty was still outside Lena’s door, her face quivering and tears now shining in the corners of her not quite symmetrical blue eyes.

Finn opened the door and walked across the tiny kitchen. He stood in the doorway of the partition he had made. Lena was crouched in the armchair under the budgerigar’s cage, her legs flexed under her, her hands up to her head. When she saw Finn she sprang. She sprang at him and at his throat, holding on to his neck and pressing her thumbs in.

Mrs. Gogarty gave a little cry and shut the door and subsided against it like a flung cushion. Finn staggered under his mother’s stranglehold. He got his hands under her
fingers which had become like steel clasps and he forced her arms down and held her turned from him, one hand holding her wrists, the other arm hooked under her jaw. She was champing now, grinding her teeth, murmuring meaninglessly, “Take me home, I want to go home.” Finn didn’t dare let her go. He knew she would attack him again, for she no longer knew who she was or he was or where they were. He said to Mrs. Gogarty,

“You do it.”

She came fearfully to take the syringe, but she had seen it done often enough before, had had it done to herself. Finn could have used a strait jacket but he balked at anything of the sort. He held her until the drug made her limp, and then he lifted her up and laid her on the bed in the diminutive bedroom.

“The picture of devotion,” mumbled Mrs. Gogarty. “The very picture.”

“Can you get home on your own okay?”

The big white face quivered in a nod.

“Won’t mind the dark?”

“It’s been dark,” she said, “since four,” and she held up for his inspection an amulet she wore round her neck. It wasn’t on account of marauders or the glassy pavements that the dark menaced her.

Finn covered Lena up and stayed with her through the night. Before dawn he gave her another injection and she lay quiet and almost without breath as if she were already dead. He didn’t know what a doctor would have given her, and he wasn’t going to call one. A doctor would want to have Lena committed and he wasn’t having that, besides listening curiously to her ravings about murder.

These began again in the morning. It was far too late for Finn to produce any trumped-up proofs to exonerate himself. She didn’t know him. He wasn’t her son but the fiend who had killed Queenie and who had killed since then a hundred women. She screamed so loudly that one of the
people from downstairs came up and said he was calling the police if it didn’t stop.

Finn got hot milk with phenobarbitone in it down her throat. Because it didn’t work at once he forced brandy into her. He was terrified he might overdo it and kill her, but he had to silence those cries. They had been through so much together, he and she, fighting the world, exploring the unseen, approaching strange spiritual agents. She cried herself to sleep and he sat beside her, looking inscrutably at that pale twisted face, holding her big veined hand in his big hand, the nearest he had ever got to tenderness with a living creature.

On the Sunday she walked round and round the room, feeling up the walls with her fingertips as if she were blind, lifting every ornament and feeling it and sniffing it. When she was asleep he took the bird and bird-cage down to his room. She would kill the bird, twist it to death in her strong hands as she had the last one, and then break her heart over its death. He gave her phenobarbitone every day until her eyes focussed again and rested on him and a voice that was more or less normal came out of her cracked and swollen lips.

“Don’t let them take me away.”

“Come on,” said Finn. “Would I?”

She cried and she couldn’t stop. She cried for hours, tossing this way and that, burying her face in her hands, throwing her head back and forwards, crying until it seemed that all the madness had been washed away in tears.

“Three cheers for the Three Musketeers!” said Norman Tremlett, waving and slightly spilling his gin and tonic.

He had said this every Christmas for the past ten years and probably would say it every Christmas for the rest of his life if given the opportunity. He referred, of course, to himself, Martin, and Adrian Vowchurch. Adrian smiled his thin, tolerant, resigned smile at Norman and handed him a dish of Japanese rice crackers. Although these had been available as cocktail snacks almost as long as Martin (and therefore Norman too) could remember, Norman affected to find them an extremely
avant-garde
novelty, examined them clownishly, and expressed as his opinion that they were really made out of insects. Everyone knew the Japanese ate insects. His own father had been offered chocolate-covered ants while in Tokyo on a business trip.

Norman always behaved like this at parties. Nobody minded because he was basically so kind and good-natured. He and Adrian and Martin had been at school together and each, in his particular field, had later entered his father’s firm. Norman was a surveyor and Adrian a solicitor. Norman, as well as his Three Musketeers joke, sometimes called them the Triumvirate. It gave Martin considerable deep pleasure and a feeling of power to think that his closest friends were his solicitor and his surveyor, and he was sure they felt the same about him being their accountant. He handled the Tremlett and Vowchurch financial affairs, and when he had bought his flat, Norman had made
the preliminary survey and Adrian had handled the conveyance.

Of the three of them only Adrian had so far married. Because of Francesca, Martin felt closer to him this year than he had done for a long time. Adrian had married a girl with a lot of family money and they lived in a smart little house in Barnsbury. They gave the sort of parties Martin liked, not too many people and nearly all people one knew, proper drinks not plonk, a buffet meal but a real one with courses. There wasn’t any loud music or dancing, and the guests stood around in groups talking. Martin couldn’t help thinking that Tim would probably be having a Christmas party and that it would be very different from this one, dark, noisy, and with goings-on it was better not to think of. Finding himself briefly alone with Adrian, Martin said on an impulse,