“What happened to that killer in Washington?”
“They finally caught him at the scene.”
“Did they save the woman?”
Grace looked away.
“I can’t remember,” she said. “All I can say is that this isn’t a sweating psychopath living in a cardboard box under a bridge. He’s probably functioning perfectly well at the moment. Ted Bundy returned from committing two separate murders and, according to his girlfriend, he didn’t even seem tired.”
“Who’s he?”
“Another man who killed women.”
“But why go to all this trouble?” I protested. “Why not just attack women in dark alleys?”
“The trouble is part of the pleasure. The point I’m making, Nadia, is that you’ve got to give up all your commonsense views about character or motive. He’s not after your money. He doesn’t even hate you. At least, that’s not how he sees it. He may see it as love. Think of the letters he sends: They are love letters, in a perverse way. He becomes obsessive about the women he chooses.”
“You mean he’s the train-spotter and I’m the train.”
“Well, sort of.”
“But why? I can’t understand all this effort, writing notes, doing a drawing, taking terrible risks delivering the notes, and then killing these ordinary women horribly. Why?”
I looked Grace in the eyes. Her face was now almost a mask, expressionless.
“You think because terrible things are happening there have to be big motives. At some point, this person will be in custody and someone-it may be me-will talk to him about his life. Maybe he was savagely beaten as a child, or abused by an uncle, or suffered a head injury which resulted in a brain lesion. That will be the reason. Of course there are plenty of people who were savagely beaten or abused or injured who don’t grow up as sexual psychopaths. It’s just what he likes doing. Why do we like doing what we like doing?”
“What do you think will happen?”
She lit yet another cigarette.
“He’s escalating,” she said. “The first murder was almost opportunistic. He probably didn’t even look at her face, as if he wanted to eliminate her individuality. The second was far more violent and invasive. It’s a characteristic pattern. The crimes become more violent and uncontrolled. The perpetrator gets caught.”
I suddenly felt as if a cloud had passed over the sun. I looked up. It hadn’t. The sky was a beautiful blue.
“That should be helpful to the person after next that he picks on.”
We both got up to leave. I looked round at Lynne and she avoided my gaze. I turned back to Grace.
“How do you feel about the last couple of months?” I asked. “Are you pleased with the way you’ve conducted the inquiry?”
She picked up her sunglasses, her keys, and her cigarette packet.
“I gave up smoking-when was it?-five years ago, I think. I keep going over and over and thinking what I could have done different. When he’s caught, maybe I’ll know.” She gave a rueful smile. “Don’t worry. I’m not asking for your sympathy.” She took something out of her pocket and offered it to me. It was a business card. “You can call me anytime.”
I took it and looked at it in the pointless, polite way one does.
“I don’t think you’d be able to get there in time,” I said.
FIFTEEN
When I was at college, supposedly learning how to be a grown-up and ready for the real world, I had a friend who died of leukemia. Her name was Laura, and she had tiny feet, cheeks like rosy apples, and a dirty laugh. She got ill in her first year and died before her finals. We got used to the fact of her death and her absence from us horribly quickly, remembering her occasionally in jolts of shame and sentimentality, but I thought a great deal about Laura now. In a strange and entirely unwelcome way, I felt closer to her-and to Jenny and Zoe, women I’d never met-than I did to my living friends.
Even Zach and Janet felt distant to me. They seemed appalled, yet almost embarrassed, by my situation. They rang me up too often but didn’t come round often enough, and when we did meet there was nothing we could properly talk about, because I was in the shadow and they were in the sunlight. We were self-conscious together. It was as if I had gone beyond them, into some other place that they could not enter and I couldn’t exit. I remembered with a shiver that Laura had said the same kind of thing, toward the end, when it was obvious to all of us that she wasn’t going to make it. She had said, or shouted, rather, that she felt as if she had gone into a waiting room, and soon the door on the other side of it would open for her and she’d have to go through. I remembered the shudder of terror I had felt when she’d said that. I had imagined the door opening out onto pitch black, and stepping out of a lit and furnished room into the empty abyss.
Laura had gone through all the stages you’re supposed to go through when you’re confronting the fact of death: disbelief and anger and grief and terror and finally a dazed, numbed kind of acceptance-perhaps because she was so worn down by the treatment and by the lurches between hope and despair. One night after she had died, a group of us had had an ugly argument, fueled by too much to drink, about whether she could have lived, or lived longer, if she had struggled more, rather than giving up and letting go. In the past, the image of letting go had for me been one of a hand gently uncurling from the hand of a beloved; now, after seeing the photos and case notes, it was more of two hands clinging to a ledge until a heavy boot stamps them off. Someone said she should have fought harder, as if it was Laura’s fault that she had died, not just brutal bad luck.
I was going to fight. I didn’t know if it would make the smallest bit of difference, but that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t going to cower in blind terror in a fucking waiting room, staring at the door in the opposite wall, feeling only the heart-thumping, mouth-drying, stomach-churning, blinding, dehumanizing dread I’d been feeling for the last few days. I’d seen the photographs, the case notes. I’d talked to Grace. I didn’t have much faith in Links and Cameron, partly because I sensed they didn’t have much faith in themselves and, without ever admitting it, they were waiting for me to die. So I was left with me. Just me. And I have always hated waiting.
One thing was certain. I couldn’t go on sitting in my flat any longer, hiding from Lynne and from my own fear. The odd thing was that Lynne and I were still not talking about my possible death. It was a taboo subject. We only discussed plans, functional things like where I was going to go, and where she should wait for me. We no longer ate meals together, not even takeaway chips or toast at breakfast. I had stopped treating her like a semi-guest, a nearly-friend.
The day after I met Grace Schilling I went ice skating with Claire, who was a resting actress and usually more resting than acting. She could skate backward and do those twizzles that make your head spin. Lynne and another policewoman sat morosely on the side and watched me smashing into young children, toppling them like nine pins, and falling over myself in a wild flailing of arms and legs. Then, later the same day, I invited myself to Zach’s and told him to get other friends round, which he obediently did. Lynne waited outside while we ate tacos and I drank too much red wine and made loud and stupid jokes, and only tipped myself back into the waiting car at two in the morning. And all the time, even when I was flooding my body with alcohol or flirting with a man called Terence who was clearly gay and embarrassed by me, I was trying to think what to do next. Grace had said that people like this man were always several steps ahead: more focused, more determined, more persistent. I wanted to get a step ahead of him.