'It was terrible,' the first said. 'Was it your Frank, Josie, who told you about it?'
'No, not Frank,' Josie replied. 'Frank was still at sea. It was Mrs Tyzack.'
The witness established, Josie relinquished the story to her companion, and turned her gaze back upon Helen. The suspicion bad not yet died from her eyes.
'This was only the month before last,' Josie said. 'Just about the end of August. It was August, wasn't it?' She looked to the other woman for verification. 'You've got the head for dates, Maureen.'
Maureen looked uncomfortable. 'I forget,' she said, clearly unwilling to offer testimony.
'I'd like to know,' Helen said. Josie, despite her companion's reluctance, was eager to oblige.
'There's some lavatories,' she said, 'outside the shops - you know, public lavatories. I'm not quite sure how it all happened exactly, but there used to be a boy... well, he wasn't a boy really, I mean he was a man of twenty or more, but he was - she fished for the words, '...mentally subnormal, I suppose you'd say. His mother used to have to take him around like he was a four year old. Anyhow, she let him go into the lavatories while she went to that little supermarket, what's it called?' she turned to Maureen for a prompt, but the other woman just looked back, her disapproval plain. Josie was ungovernable, however. 'Broad daylight, this was,' she said to Helen. 'Middle of the day. Anyhow, the boy went to the toilet, and the mother was in the shop. And after a while, you know how you do, she's busy shopping, she forgets about him, and then she thinks he's been gone a long time...'
At this juncture Maureen couldn't prevent herself from butting in: the accuracy of the story apparently took precedence over her wariness.
' - She got into an argument,' she corrected Josie, 'with the manager. About some bad bacon she'd had from him. That was why she was such a tune.
'I see,' said Helen.
' - anyway,' said Josie, picking up the tale, 'she finished her shopping and when she came out he still wasn't there - '
'So she asked someone from the supermarket - Maureen began, but Josie wasn't about to have her narrative snatched back at this vital juncture.
'She asked one of the men from the supermarket -' she repeated over Maureen's interjection, 'to go down into the lavatory and find him.'
'It was terrible,' said Maureen, clearly picturing the atrocity in her mind's eye.
'He was lying on the floor, in a pool of blood.'
'Murdered?'
Josie shook her head. 'He'd have been better off dead. He'd been attacked with a razor - she let this piece of information sink in before delivering the coup de grace, - and they'd cut off his private parts. Just cut them off and flushed them down a toilet. No reason on earth to do it.'
'Oh my God.'
'Better off dead,' Josie repeated. 'I mean, they can't mend something like that, can they?'
The appalling tale was rendered worse still by the sang-froid of the teller, and by the casual repetition of 'Better off dead'.
'The boy,' Helen said, 'Was he able to describe his attackers?'
'No,' said Josie, 'he's practically an imbecile. He can't string more than two words together.'
'And nobody saw anyone go into the lavatory? Or leaving it?'
'People come and go all the time - Maureen said. This, though it sounded like an adequate explanation, had not been Helen's experience. There was not a great bustle in the quadrangle and passageways; far from it. Perhaps the shopping mall was busier, she reasoned, and might offer adequate cover for such a crime.
'So they haven't found the culprit,' she said.
'No,' Josie replied, her eyes losing their fervour. The crime and its immediate consequences were the nub of this story; she had little or no interest in either the culprit or his capture.
'We're not safe in our own beds,' Maureen observed. 'You ask anyone.'
'Anne-Marie said the same,' Helen replied. 'That's how she came to tell me about the old man. Said he was murdered during the summer, here in Ruskin Court.'
'I do remember something,' Josie said. 'There was some talk I heard. An old man, and his dog. He was battered to death, and the dog ended up... I don't know. It certainly wasn't here. It must have been one of the other estates.'
'Are you sure?'
The woman looked offended by this slur on her memory. 'Oh yes,' she said, 'I mean if it had been here, we'd have known the story, wouldn't we?'
Helen thanked the pair for their help and decided to take a stroll around the quadrangle anyway, just to see how many more maisonettes were out of operation here. As in Butts' Court, many of the curtains were drawn and all the doors locked. But then if Spector Street was under siege from a maniac capable of the murder and mutilation such as she'd heard described, she was not surprised that the residents took to their homes and stayed there. There was nothing much to see around the court. All the unoccupied maisonettes and flats had been recently sealed, to judge by a litter of nails left on a doorstep by the council workmen. One sight did catch her attention however. Scrawled on the paving stones she was walking over - and all but erased by rain and the passage of feet - the same phrase she'd seen in the bedroom of number 14: Sweets to the sweet. The words were so benign; why did she seem to sense menace in them? Was it in their excess, perhaps, in the sheer overabundance of sugar upon sugar, honey upon honey?
She walked on, though the rain persisted, and her walkabout gradually led her away from the quadrangles and into a concrete no-man's-land through which she had not previously passed. This was - or had been - the site of the estate's amenities. Here was the children's playground, its metal-framed rides overturned, its sandpit fouled by dogs, its paddling pool empty. And here too were the shops. Several had been boarded up; those that hadn't were dingy and unattractive, their windows protected by heavy wire-mesh.
She walked along the row, and rounded a corner, and there in front of her was a squat brick building. The public lavatory, she guessed, though the signs designating it as such had gone. The iron gates were closed and padlocked. Standing in front of the charmless building, the wind gusting around her legs, she couldn't help but think of what had happened here. Of the man-child, bleeding on the floor, helpless to cry out. It made her queasy even to contemplate it. She turned her thoughts instead to the felon. What would he look like, she wondered, a man capable of such depravities? She tried to make an image of him, but no detail she could conjure carried sufficient force. But then monsters were seldom very terrible once hauled into the plain light of day. As long as this man was known only by his deeds he held untold power over the imagination; but the human truth beneath the terrors would, she knew, be bitterly disappointing. No monster he; just a whey-faced apology for a man more needful of pity than awe.
The next gust of wind brought the rain on more heavily. It was time, she decided, to be done with adventures for the day. Turning her back on the public lavatories she hurried back through the quadrangles to the refuge of the car, the icy rain needling her face to numbness.
The dinner guests looked gratifyingly appalled at the story, and Trevor, to judge by the expression on his face, was furious. It was done now, however; there was no taking it back. Nor could she deny her satisfaction she took in having silenced the inter-departmental babble about the table. It was Bernadette, Trevor's assistant in the History Department, who broke the agonizing hush.
'When was this?'
'During the summer,' Helen told her.
'I don't recall reading about it,' said Archie, much the better for two hours of drinking; it mellowed a tongue which was otherwise fulsome in its self-corruscation.
'Perhaps the police are suppressing it,' Daniel commented.
'Conspiracy?' said Trevor, plainly cynical.
'It's happening all the time,' Daniel shot back.
'Why should they suppress something like this?' Helen said. 'It doesn't make sense.'