Whitstable (14 page)

He draws his sword. With it firmly in one hand, he lifts Ingrid Pitt up by the hair in her coffin. Cuts off her head in one swipe.

As George Cole utters a heartfelt prayer that their country is rid of such devils, Peter Cushing’s General lowers the severed head into the coffin. And Carmilla’s portrait on the castle wall, young and beautiful as she was long ago—in life—turns slowly to that of a decomposed and rotting skull.

***

Cushing turned his head and found the seat next to him empty.

As the cast list rolled up the screen, he stood and looked round an auditorium lit only by the spill from the projector beam. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand but it was clear nobody was present but himself.

He was still standing facing the small, square window of the projection room when the house lights faded up. He found himself even more clearly in a sea of empty seats. The smell of popcorn and Kia-Ora returned. This time he found it almost pleasant.

He walked into the sunlit foyer with one arm in his coat sleeve. A number of young couples were queuing for tickets for the next performance. One person noticed him and smiled. He raised a hand, not too ostentatiously, not wanting to draw attention to himself, then criss-crossed his scarf on his chest and dragged on the rest of his coat. Another few people arrived. Quite a healthy gathering for an early evening showing. He was pleased, in a subdued way, as if one of his children had done well at school, with little help from himself. The film
was
a hit, and as long as the public liked it, he wished it well.

He let the heavy door shut behind him. Even more than usually when he had seen a film in the afternoon, the sunlight came as a shock. It almost blinded him, but he was grateful for the warmth on his skin. He raised his chin and stood with his eyes closed for several minutes, and when he opened them, found it noticeably strange that there was not a single gull in the sky.

Ten minutes later he committed the oyster knife to the sea with a throw worthy of a fielder at the Oval.

***

When he arrived home at 3 Seaway Cottages he felt Helen’s smile in the air immediately, like the most delicate and distinctive fragrance.

“Look.” He lifted his hand up in front of his face. “I’m still shaking.”

You were wonderful.

“Nonsense.”

You
are
wonderful, Peter.

He felt a strange fluttering at the back of his throat and looked at the door to the living room but didn’t open it.

“So are you, my love.”

Suddenly he found he was ravenously hungry for the first time in he didn’t know when.

In the kitchen he took two slices of bread and cooked cheese on toast under the grille, served with a generous dollop of HP sauce. His appetite undiminished, he made two more rounds, slightly burned, just the way he liked it.

That night he slept soundly, and without dreams.

***

He was woken early the following morning by the telephone ringing as if on a distant shore. He sat up in bed, body lifted as if by a crane, not particularly hurrying to do so. Recent events still had not returned fully to his consciousness. Images drifted. Feelings coagulated, some real, some imagined, all vague and irrepressible. His head was too thick with slumber to sort fact from fiction and he wondered if he was waking up or acting waking up. He needed a minute to think about that, if you’d be so kind. The telephone, impolitely, was still ringing with a persistence normally reserved for insects and small children. He slumped back onto the pillow, hoping to return to the land of Nod. The telephone had other ideas.

When it started to ring the third time he could ignore it no longer. He picked up the receiver, rubbing sleep from his eyes with his other hand. He recited the number, automatically.

“Peter?” A man’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Did I wake you?” It was Derek Wake. Appropriately named, in this instance.

“No. Not at all.” He was about to add that he’d answered because he thought it was perhaps Joyce ringing, but the Inspector interrupted his thoughts.

“I’m sorry, Peter, but I thought I’d better ring before you hear this on the jungle telegraph. I thought you might want to know. Les Gledhill died in a car accident last night, on the stretch of the M2 between Faversham and the junction with the A249 near Sittingbourne. There doesn’t appear to have been any other vehicle involved, and there was no-one else in the car at the time.” Having said this quickly without pausing, he suddenly stopped.

Cushing felt the silence looming and wished his head was clearer. An element of him wondered if he was still asleep. Meanwhile he heard the detective’s voice fill the gap with more words:

“His car left the carriageway. It was a head-on collision. He hit the central reservation, the barrier, span across into the hard shoulder. Complete write off. As I say, no other vehicle was involved. …Peter?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

He was awake now. Fully. But he did not know what to say.

He wondered if the policeman would ask him next why he was in conflict with Gledhill over some issue concerning his son, and probe more fully why exactly Gledhill had made accusations against him. If he might resurrect the questions he himself had asked during his visit to the station concerning a film story about child molestation. A film which, when examined more closely, would be seen to be a complete fabrication.

But Wake asked none of these things.

“He was dead on arrival at Canterbury Hospital. Died instantly. Appears to have been driving at very high speed, from the tyre marks. No witnesses. Whether he lost control for some reason, or did it on purpose, we don’t know. These things happen. You don’t often see them coming. Those close to the deceased, I mean…”

Disappear. Turn to dust…

What he’d meant was, go. Leave town. Go away. Not this. Then he remembered:

What do you want me to do?

Do what is right and good, for once.

Good?

Save yourself, in the only way you can.

Dear Lord…

Was Gledhill in his final moments thinking of his immortal soul? Had he simply decided to do something good, for once, as he’d been bidden, for someone other than himself? Or was suicide just what it often was, as Peter Cushing knew all too well, the act of a coward? A weak man’s only escape from an unbearable future?

“Peter?”

He rubbed his eyes again. The room wasn’t focusing, so he kept them shut. He was aware that the other man could hear his breathing down the telephone and was waiting for him to reply, so he spoke in as steady a voice as he could muster.

“Derek, can I ask you something, please?” he said with his eyes still closed. “I want you to do something. This is very important to me. I can’t tell you why, but it is.”

***

The hospital, the car park, the very sight of the building itself inevitably brought back memories of Helen, and he was ready for that. Mercifully, she hadn’t passed away there, but during her long illness visits were all too frequent, and each time accompanied by a sense of immense dread, of what might be discovered, of what one, this time, might be told. He was surprised, then, that no such feelings asserted themselves. On the contrary, he felt calm, in fact unusually so. Plainly there was a world of difference between visiting the love of your life and—this.

Naturally Wake had questioned why he wanted to do it, and Cushing wondered how many other questions the policeman kept to himself, and for how long he would continue to do so. But in reply to the man’s enquiries—clearly worried at a widower seeing a dead body so recently after the death of his wife—he could only reply honestly that he felt nothing.

“Peter, these places are cold and clinical. They breathe death.”

“I assure you, dear boy. I’m perfectly fine.”

As they walked along the antiseptic-smelling corridor Wake explained that the sister’s expression ‘Rose Cottage’ was the euphemism often used by nursing staff when talking about the hospital mortuary. As they approached it Cushing thought of the roses he tended in his own garden, round his own front door. The roses Helen loved. He pictured himself snipping one off and handing it to her, as he did, on many an occasion. How she’d invariably reward him with a kiss on the cheek.

They’d done their best to take the curse off the viewing room, of course, but it was still a hospital room badly playing the part of a Chapel of Rest. They almost needn’t have bothered. As the door opened it had the feel of a shrunken and poverty-stricken church hall. The floor was the same slightly-peeling linoleum as the corridor, the walls insalubrious teak, with cheap beading intended to simulate panelling, and curtains on one wall a deep navy blue, the only colour.

He’d had it explained to him that the post-mortem had been done and the body was now being stored there—presumably in one of those pull-out fridges—until the undertakers collected it. He removed his hat and stepped closer to the bed, bier, table, whatever it was called. He was all too aware that the actions he was going through were normally the province of the close family, even though Wake had told him Carl’s mother had no desire to see the body of her boyfriend. Accordingly, in spite of all he knew about the dead man, he felt he should behave with respect.

At a nod from Wake, who remained at the door, the assistant moved forward and folded down the white sheet covering the face so that the head and shoulders were exposed. Cushing noticed the clean, fastidiously manicured hands before the man stood back.

In death, they say, we are all equal
, he thought.

He looked down and saw that a white linen cravat was tucked round the corpse’s neck. He reached over and touched its rim with his fingertips. The attendant took a step forward and was about to speak, but Wake raised his hand. The man stepped back.

Tugged down, the elastic of the linen cravat revealed a livid scar running round the circumference of Gledhill’s neck, the twine stitches, heavy and harsh, still abundantly visible. Frankenstein stitches. Holes dug deep with thick needles like fish hooks into dead, unfeeling flesh.

“Impact would have killed him outright,” Wake said. “The front of the car was like a concertina. Steering column went straight through his chest. No chance.”

Cushing pictured himself as General Spielsdorf again, holding the stake over Carmilla’s heart and shoving it down with every ounce of his strength. Blood pumping up, filling the cavity as her wild eyes stared in perplexed fury.

“Cigarette?”

Cushing shook his head. Wake lit one of his own and blew smoke. It drifted in front of Gledhill’s cadaver like the mist in Karnstein castle graveyard.

“As if that wasn’t enough, he was decapitated too. The force of the crash sent him right into the windscreen. They found his head thirty yards down the hard shoulder. Apparently it’s not uncommon. Tell you what. I’d never be a motorway cop for all the tea in China.”

Cushing saw himself lifting up the body of Ingrid Pitt by the hair. The silvery flash of his sword as it sliced through her throat.

“They’ve done a decent job.”

He wasn’t sure what the Inspector meant.

“After a real old mess like that. I mean, he looks at peace.”

“Yes,” Cushing said, gazing back at the figure on the bed and readjusting the white cravat to its former position. “I think he does.”

He didn’t know if it was the effect of chemicals used by the pathologist or the fluorescent lighting, but the man seemed years younger, as if, absurdly, all the sins had been lifted off him. His skin unblemished, his hair neatly combed as if by an insistent mother. He wondered what was strange and then realised that, for some mysterious reason, his beard had been shaved off. He seemed, in fact, for all the world, strangely like a child.

Cushing looked at the crucifix on the wall opposite—the room’s only concession to decoration—and found himself, in an almost imperceptible gesture, making the sign of the cross over his own heart as he turned away.

As he reached the door he heard Wake’s voice behind him.

“Have you got what you want?”

“Mm?”

He turned back. The assistant was covering Gledhill’s face with the sheet, and Wake was standing beside him, ash gathering on his cigarette as he sucked it.

“For your research? I presume that’s why you wanted to see the body.”

“Yes.” Cushing tweaked the front of his trilby between thumb and forefinger before placing it on his head. “Yes, I have.”

***

On the way home many thoughts went through his mind, but the one he was left with as he opened the front door was that, earlier, that morning, as his hand had picked up the receiver, he had wanted it to be Joycie at the other end of the line. Much as he feared talking to her, it was a fear he had to face—no,
wanted
to face, and that evening after a supper of Heinz tomato soup he decided to take matters into his own hands, and ring her himself. He was absolutely sure it was what Helen would want him to do. No, what she would
expect
of him. Because it was right.

No sooner had he said her name, “Joycie”, than they both wept.

Without hesitation he asked her to come back. Equally without hesitation, she agreed.

“I’m so sorry if I’ve been rude or inconsiderate…”

“No, sir. You’ve never been that. Never.” He could hear her blowing her nose in a tissue. Soon he found himself doing the same.

“What a pair we are,” he said. “Dear oh dear. I shall have to get more Kleenex tomorrow, shan’t I? I think I need to order a truck-load.”

She laughed, but it was tinged with the same kind of enfeebled anguish as his own. He wondered, as he often did, if he would hear his own laughter, proper laughter, that is, ever again.

“You see, Joycie, everywhere I see reminders of her. I can’t help it. This room. Every room. Every street I walk. Every person I meet. It’s simply unbearable, you see…”

“I know, sir.”

“Do you forgive me?” he said.

And, before she could form an answer, they wept again, till the tissues ran out.