Saul’s chest had gone quite hollow.
Somewhere Deborah was saying something to him.
Oh, he felt stupid.
He saw what he had lost.
Stupid, stupid boy, he thought, and at the same time he was thinking: You needn’t have worried, Dad. You were strong as fuck.
Tears came cold to his eyes and he heard Deborah again.
Look at what you lost, he thought. She died! he thought suddenly. She died, and still he did right by me. How could he? I killed her, I killed his wife! Every time he looked at me, wasn’t he looking at the rape? Wasn’t he looking at the thing that killed his wife?
Stupid boy, he thought. Uncle Rat? When were you going to think that one through? he thought.
But more than anything he could not stop wondering at the man who had raised him, had tried to understand him, and had given him books to help him understand the world. Because when he had looked at Saul, somehow he did not see murder, or his lost wife, or the brutality in the alley (and Saul knew just how that attacker had appeared, as if from nowhere, out of the bricks, as he himself moved). Somehow, when he looked at Saul he looked at his son, and even when the air between them had poisoned and Saul had exercised all his studied teenage insouciance not to care, the fat man had still looked at him and seen his son, and had tried to understand what was wrong between them. He had had no truck with the awful, bloody vulgarity of genes. He had built fatherhood with his actions.
Saul did not sob, but his cheeks were wet. Wasn’t it odd and sad, he thought a little hysterically, that it was only on learning that his father was not his father, that he realized how completely his father he had been?
There’s a dialectic for you, Dad, he thought, and grinned fleetingly.
It was only in losing him that he regained him, finally, after so many dry years.
He remembered being carried on those broad shoulders to see his mother’s stone. He had killed her, he had killed his father’s wife, and his father had set him down gently and given him flowers to put on her grave. He wept for his father, who had been given his wife’s murderer, the child of her rapist, and who had decided to love him dearly, and had set out to do it, and had succeeded.
And somewhere he kept telling himself how stupid a boy he was. A new thought was occurring to him. If King Rat lied about this, he reflected, and the thought trailed off like a sequence of dots…
If he lied about this, the thought said, what else did he lie about?
Who killed Dad?
He remembered something King Rat had said, a long time ago, at the end of Saul’s first life. ‘I’m the intruder,’ he had said. ‘I killed the usurper.’
In the succession of words the sense had been drowned, had been another surreal boast, a crowing, bullish aggrandizement without meaning. But Saul could see differently now. A cold stone of fury settled in his gut and he realized how much he hated King Rat.
His father, King Rat.
Chapter Nineteen
The door to the flat opened.
Saul and Deborah had been huddled together on the floor, she murmuring nervous words of support. They looked up at the same moment, at the gentle creak of hinges.
Saul scrambled silently to his feet. He was still clutching the book. Deborah rocked herself, tried to rise. A face peered around the rim of the door.
Deborah clung to Saul and gave a tiny whimper of fear. Saul was primed like an explosive, but as his eyes made light of the darkness his tension ebbed a little, and he stood confused.
The face in the doorway was beaming delightedly, long blond hair falling in untidy clumps around a mouth stretched wide in childish joy. The man stepped forward into the room. He looked like a buffoon.
‘The thought I heard someone, I thought so!’ he exclaimed. Saul straightened a little more, his brow furrowed. ‘I’ve been waiting here night after night, saying no, go home, it’s ridiculous, he won’t come here, of all places, and now here you are!’ He glanced at the book in Saul’s hand. ‘You found my reading material, then. I wanted to know all about you. I thought that might tell me a bit.’
He looked a little closer at Saul’s red eyes and his own face widened.
‘You didn’t know, did you?’ His smile of pleasure was broader than ever. ‘Well. That does explain a few things. I thought you were rather quick to join your so-called father’s murderer.’ Saul’s eyes flickered. Of course, he thought, giddy with grief, of course. The man was eyeing him. ‘I thought blood must have been thicker than water but, of course, why on Earth should he have told you?’ He rocked back on his heels, stuck his hands in his pockets.
‘I’ve needed to talk to you for a long time. The rumours have been flying about you, you know! You’ve been famous for years! So many places, so many leads, so many possibilities… I’ve been all over, chasing impossible crime… You know, any time I heard about some weird break-in, some murder, something that doesn’t fit the bill, something people couldn’t have done, I’d run to investigate. The police can be very helpful with information.’ He grinned. ‘So many dead ends! And then I came here…’ The man grinned again. ‘I could just smell him, and I knew I’d found you, Saul.’
‘Who are you?’ Saul finally breathed.
The man smiled pleasantly at him but did not answer. He seemed to see Deborah for the first time.
‘Hi! My God, what a night you must be having!’ He strolled forward as he laughed. Deborah clung still to Saul. She gazed at the man with guarded eyes. ‘Anyway,’ he continued easily, reaching out his hand towards her, ‘I’m afraid I’m not interested in you.’
He snatched her wrist and wrenched her out of Saul’s grasp. Too late, Saul realized that the urbane man had taken her, his head moved slowly down to look where she had been even as his mind screamed at him to look up, to move.
He dragged his head up through the thick air.
He saw the man close his left hand in Deborah’s hair, Saul reached out in horror, determined to intervene, but the man who was still smiling broadly glanced down at her briefly and sent his other fist slamming into the underside of her chin just as she opened her mouth to scream, and the impact split the skin and bone of her jaw and snapped her mouth closed so fast that blood spurted out from between her lips where she bit deep into her tongue. The scream died before it appeared, mutating into a wet exhalation. Even as Saul’s slow, slow feet took him towards her the man swivelled on his toes and pulled her body around from the nape of the neck where he held her, built up momentum, spun fast and buried her face in the side of the door-frame.
He released her and turned back to Saul.
Saul shrieked in anguish and disbelief, stared past the man at Deborah’s carcass, which slid down the door-frame and tumbled back into the room. It was twitching as nerve endings died. Her flattened and distorted face stared blindly up at Saul as she danced in a posthumous fit, her heels pattering on the floor like a monsoon, blood and air bubbling out of her exploded mouth.
Saul bellowed and flung himself at the man with all his rat-strength.
‘I’ll eat your fucking heart!’ he screamed.
The tall man sidestepped the flurry of blows easily, still grinning broadly. He pulled his fist back leisurely and sent it into Saul’s face.