The Thing Itself (4 page)

By then there had been a knock on my own door. A routine enquiry from a bored local policeman. The people near the racecourse had noted the registration of my car. I expected this. My brother-in-law had tutored me.

I told the bobby my car had been out of my possession at the time. Stolen. The policeman was satisfied with my answer. He did not even ask to see the vehicle.

It was the last I heard from any policeman. The torso was never identified. The murder was never solved.

For the next three years I devoted my life to my work but my wife and her brother ruled me. Then my wife and I went on holiday to Italy. We visited her family in Siena. We never went back to England. My wife never went anywhere again.

A terrible accident, I told the
polizia
. Horrible, I said. I had actually photographed it, I said.

We had gone to Spoleto, set among high, wooded hills, for me to see the magnificent fresco cycle by Fra Filippo Lippi in the cathedral. Such things did not interest my wife so her mood was not of the best, especially after an uncomfortable drive. After a late meal in our hotel dining room, we had slept in separate beds, though in the same room.

The next morning, I suggested we ignore the extensive Roman ruins in favour of the medieval aqueduct. She was interested in neither but reluctantly agreed to my plan.

We went to the east of the town and up a steep cobbled street. It was a hot morning and we moved slowly through promenading family groups.

We walked through a crumbling Roman arch and followed a path round the town's curtain wall. The ground fell steeply away into a deep wooded ravine. It was spanned by the Ponte delle Torri, the half-mile-long bridge and aqueduct.

My wife peered down at the silvery thread of water in the very bottom of the ravine among a dense growth of ilex. I knew it to be a 300-foot drop.

‘Quite a feat of engineering,' I said, squinting down the length of the bridge to a tower among the trees at the far end. I looked at the dozen thick pediments that held up the bridge and down at their foundations so far below.

‘Fourteenth century but built on Roman foundations,' I said, though I knew my wife wasn't interested. Her feet hurt from walking on the cobbles in her high-heeled shoes. I pulled my camera out of my bag. ‘I want to get a picture from the other side.'

‘I want to go back into town,' my wife said. ‘It's not like you to be so interested in taking snaps.'

I gestured at the bridge.

‘It's spectacular. Look – there's a walkway along the side. You want to come with me?'

‘I'll wait here.'

‘Come on – I need you in the picture for scale.'

The bridge was essentially to carry a water pipe, which was cased in a ten-foot-high wall of brick. The walkway to the left of this casing was about four feet wide. As protection for people on the walkway, there was a low wall topped by a rail. The wooded ravine was an almost perfect V.

We had scarcely gone more than hundred yards when my wife, glancing down at the trees and the river so far below, lurched.

‘Vertigo?' I said with concern.

‘I'm not going any further,' she said. ‘This wall is too low.'

‘“Have ye courage, O my brethren? He hath heart who knows fear but vanquishes it, who sees the abyss but with pride.”'

My wife looked at me as if I was mad.

‘Nietzsche,' I said. She snorted.

A couple of giggly teenage girls were approaching from the other side. I moved back against the iron rail and my wife flattened herself against the aqueduct wall to allow them to go by.

The walkway was now deserted beyond us. My wife began to perspire, craning her neck to look down again. It was a dizzying drop. I liked the feeling of walking in space. I took a couple of snaps.

‘Can we go back now?' my wife said sharply.

‘I'd like a picture from the other side. Wait – I'll be back soon.'

‘Wait for you?'

But I was already striding off.

‘Come back!'

I waved.

‘Five minutes.'

I disappeared behind the tower at the far end of the bridge. As I did so, two men in dark suits stepped on to the walkway and set off briskly towards the centre of the bridge. I followed a rough trail up through the trees. I could still glimpse the aqueduct with the town above it.

I saw my wife start to totter off the walkway. I found a spiral staircase pretty much intact in the tower. I went up two steps at a time and came out on to a magnificent view. From this height I could see the snow-streaked mountains rising behind the sprawl of Spoleto.

My wife had stopped on the bridge, facing the two men in dark suits whose laughter I could hear from the tower. She was standing a little stiffly, looking everywhere but down into the ravine. I took her picture.

I trained my camera on her as the two men purposefully approached.

My wife stepped back to let the two men go by. They didn't go by. I had paid them well. They lifted my wife into the air and out over the parapet. There was nothing but air between her and the silver thread of water. The men dangled her over the parapet, her skirt falling down over her head. They let her go.

I took her snap. Arms flailing, she fell to the river so far below.

I telephoned her brother.

‘You're a dead man,' he said.

‘I'm staying in Italy for a while.'

‘That won't save you.'

‘You know that Mussolini hates the Mafia? Most of the Mafiosi here are either dead, in prison or in hiding. I don't recommend you do anything rash.'

‘I can wait,' he said.

‘You're going to have to.'

I gazed at the wall in front of me. It was as blank as my heart.

We give ourselves airs. Significance. Every life is sacred. No, it isn't. After the Great War only an imbecile would believe that.

Life is nothing. We are animals, and animals die. When the spark dies, you become a thing. What are we, after all? Bone and gristle. Meat and muscle. Is a knee joint sacred? Has a shoulder blade a soul?

Life is not sacred, although it is perhaps a gift. You have it and it is snatched away as I snatched away the lives of my mistress and my wife.

As mine will one day be snatched away.

D
etective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist was reading the
Guardian
with increasing irritation when her phone rang. She ignored it, focusing instead on the offending article, from the newspaper's crime correspondent.

The headline read: ‘No Action To Be Taken Against Police Officers Involved In Milldean Massacre.'

The article went on:

Sarah Gilchrist dropped the newspaper on the low table beside her. Bastards. She hated that nothing had been resolved, that she was no nearer knowing exactly what had happened. Especially given all that it had sparked: the arrival of Balkan gangsters, grotesque medieval deaths, a bloodbath in the Grand Hotel and another in a village outside Dieppe. John Hathaway, Brighton's crime king for the past four decades, left to die, stuck on the end of a pole on a cliff-top.

She shuddered at the thought of her own close encounter with the psychopathic Bosnian torturer Miladin Radislav, also known as Vlad the Impaler. He'd come for her as part of his vengeful rampage through Brighton. She vividly recalled his grey face and his cold eyes as he bore down on her on the beach whilst she was embroiled with a gang of feral girls. The irony was that his arrival had saved her from them.

She swallowed bile and lowered her feet from the wrought iron framing the balcony and looked down on the pretty garden below her. She had liked it here at first in Clarence Square. It was central – the shops were just up the road, the sea just down it – and it had been a little oasis of sunny quiet. In the daytime at least.

The small hotels on either side of her did get noisy on summer nights. Especially when those dirty weekenders who had balconies and had their French windows open moaned, groaned and bellowed into the square through the night.

But now it was an oasis no longer. Noisy lovers were the least of it. She felt exposed, vulnerable. The journalists had been bad enough. As the time had approached for the Police Complaints Authority to make its announcement, she had avoided the balcony because of the journalists harassing her. Some threw notes up. Others shouted her name repeatedly from the street below.

Only a few days earlier one had taken a room in the hotel next door and climbed on to her balcony to photograph her. She'd freaked out when she'd heard him tapping on the window. When the photo appeared in several newspapers the next morning, she thought of complaining to the Press Complaints Commission. Then she discovered the chair of the PCC was the editor of one of the papers that had splashed her all over its front page.

But her fear now was that if a journalist could get easily get close, so could Miladin Radislav.

She was standing near her balcony when the phone started again. It was DI Reg Williamson, her sometime partner, recently promoted to be her acting boss. The promotion was hers by rights, but she'd had no rights after Milldean. Williamson was conscious of that and never pulled rank on her, treating her as a partner in exactly the same way as before. Indeed, usually deferring to her.

‘Reg,' she said. ‘Why is it I know you're not calling for anything good?'

‘Experience?'

‘That would do it.'

‘Actually, it's not so bad. Wanted you to check on that girl you rescued on the beach. She should be about ready to give a statement about those girls who attacked her.'

A
t the hospital Sarah Gilchrist went to the private room occupied by the girl she'd rescued from a stoning on the beach. She'd seen a group of teenage girls attacking her at the water's edge, photographing their assault. When Gilchrist got to her, she found her bloodied, bruised and unconscious, water swirling round her.

The girl was the only child of a single mother who lived on the Milldean estate. Her name was Sarah Jessica Cassidy and she was thirteen. She'd been in intensive care for days, her distraught mother hovering, but now had been moved into this private room. She had no memory of the incident and, miraculously, no permanent physical scarring or damage. She was, however, black and blue all over, with three broken ribs, her left arm in a cast and all the fingers on her right hand taped up.

Gilchrist visited her in her civvies – jeans, white T-shirt and leather jacket. She asked the WPC keeping guard on the door to step inside to witness their conversation.

‘How are you?' Gilchrist said.

‘You a copper?'

Gilchrist smiled.

‘Is it that obvious?'

Cassidy's head had been shaved to get at half a dozen or so cuts and gashes on her scalp. Underneath the bruising she was a pretty girl but she had a sullen mouth.

‘When you know what you're looking for.' Cassidy gestured at the WPC. ‘Plus, she's a bit of a giveaway.'

‘I suppose she is,' Gilchrist said.

Cassidy examined Gilchrist's face.

‘You the one who found me?'

Gilchrist nodded.

‘They said it was a hefty woman.'