Waking early the next morning, he turned in the bed and ran his right hand over the curve of her hip and down between her legs. She leaned sideways and took something from her bag on the bedside table. At first he thought she was going to pass him a condom, but then he saw her fit a mask over her eyes. The mask was beige, with the words air india on it.
“You’re not going to wear that, are you?” he said.
“Yes,” she said coolly. “Do you mind?”
Though startled, he could already envisage the erotic possibilities — how her blindness might give him licence. “Well,” he said, “if that’s what you want…”
After they had finished making love, she told him that he had gripped her so tightly when he came that she felt as if he had somehow reached through her skin, all seven layers of it, right into her muscles, even her bones, as if he had penetrated her body all over, and not just in the one place.
“I didn’t hurt you?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I liked it.”
Later that morning, they walked along a short stretch of the Pennine Way. As he stared off into the distance, the shadows of clouds blue-black on the smooth sides of the fells, he asked her about the eye-mask. What was it exactly, he said, that she didn’t want to see?
“I’m shy,” she said.
He laughed. “You? Shy?”
She was standing knee-deep in rough grass, a piece of saxifrage in the palm of her hand.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked.
“I’m not afraid.”
“Is it me?”
Her hand closed over the small white flower, and she gave him a look that came at him straight and level. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
This was both succinct and ambiguous — was she telling him not to overestimate his own importance, or was she trying to reassure him? — but he also sensed a kind of shakiness or trepidation, and he knew he’d stumbled on something that might help him to explain her. She wouldn’t elaborate, however, and he decided not to press her. Instead, he took her hand, which he would never have dared to do if they hadn’t been the only people for miles around. She affected not to notice, but he thought her fingers tightened around his. Rare though they were, such moments gave him hope: in time, perhaps, she might go a little easier on him…
That evening they drank pints of Guinness in the hotel bar, served by a man from the Midlands. In his early forties, with a gold tooth and a wicked tongue, he was soon making Venetia laugh with tales of local scandal, and Billy saw that for all the intimacies of the past twenty-four hours he had no hold over her, no claim whatsoever.
At dinner Venetia took charge of the wine list, ordering a white to go with their starters, then switching to red for the main course.
Billy shook his head. “It’s amazing, the amount you drink.”
“It must be the Scottish side of me,” she said. “My father—” She checked herself. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”
What he learned that night would alter him for ever. Certain stories lodge like rusty hooks in the soft flesh of the mind. You cannot free yourself.
Sitting in the mortuary with his eyes shut, Billy heard the rasp of a lighter.
“You’d know all about that, of course,” he said.
35
His eyes still closed, he saw the woman not in lilac or maroon, not in a suit at all, in fact, but in a kind of gown. Shapeless it was, and hooded. Brown or black.
“They’ll never forgive me, will they,” she said, “not even now I’m dead?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think they will.” He paused, and then decided that he might as well tell the truth. “It’s strange, but I think people hate you even more now. It’s like what you did has got worse with the passing of time — or maybe it’s taken this long for the full horror of it all to sink in.”
She fell silent, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her before. At times, he wasn’t sure whether she was still there, but then he would hear a swift, sharp intake of breath as she inhaled, or the faint scrape of a shoe against the floor as she altered the position of her legs. Though he was in danger of falling asleep, he resisted the temptation to open his eyes. He didn’t want to see her again. He had already seen enough of her, he felt, to last a lifetime.
“Sometimes I dream I’m standing in a crowd,” she said at last, “or else I’m walking along, surrounded by hundreds of people. I don’t know any of them. They’re all strangers. But it feels like — like luxury.” There was another silence. He imagined a cigarette butt falling in slow-motion through the air and vanishing between two bars of the drain’s dark metal grille.
“To be part of a crowd,” she said. “You don’t know how I long for that.”
“They’d probably tear you to pieces,” he said.
“In my dream, no one recognises me. They’ve never heard of me. They don’t notice me at all.”
“You did something people couldn’t bring themselves to think about. You forced them to imagine it. You rubbed their noses in it.”
That was what they meant, he realised, when they called her a monster. She had shown them what a human being was capable of. She had given them a glimpse of the horrific and terrifying acts that lay within their grasp. She had reminded them of a truth that they had overlooked, or hidden from, or lied to themselves about.
“That’s why they can’t forgive you,” he said. “I mean, maybe if you’d broken down in court—”
She let out a short, sardonic laugh. “I’m not a bloody actress.”
“They needed something.”
“They wouldn’t have believed me.”
He thought about that. Over the years, there had been a number of people who had taken her side. They saw her continuing imprisonment as political, driven not by the rule of law but by popular opinion. Other murderers were freed when they had served their sentences — why not her? Clearly, she was no danger to society. In fact, the opposite was true: were she to be released, society would be a danger to her. And here was the savage irony: taxpayers’ money would have to be used to protect the woman from what the taxpayers themselves would try and do to her. No government would willingly put itself in the position of having to defend such a policy. Instead, the responsibility for her fate was handed swiftly from one Home Secretary to another, like a particularly hazardous game of pass-the-parcel.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “I don’t think there was any way back from what you did. They’d never have let you out, not in a million years.”