So that probably was why finding out that Moker had been female hit me hard. God, what had life been like for her? And had her physical appearance driven out all her femininity? I mean, just the way she walked! And I thought she was just plump when I saw her naked chest! What was God’s great plan for her? My spirit—literally—my spirit sagged. I couldn’t move so had to listen to Coates as he continued.
“Those telephone books, by the way,” the detective was saying. “We wondered about them when we searched Moker’s flat. You know, without a proper mouth there could hardly be any two-way dialogue, plus there wasn’t a phone in the flat anyway. James True’s wife—widow—told us Moker never said a word when she attacked her and her daughter, she just made kinda grunting noises and snorts.”
Sadler, no doubt still digesting the startling news of Moker’s gender—I’m sure there can’t have been many female serial killers in the annals of crime—spoke curtly to Coates. “What’s your point?” he snapped.
Simmons came to his colleague’s rescue. “We also found unposted letters in the flat. Poison-pen letters, no two alike, every envelope addressed differently and to both men and women. We reckon she chose them from the telephone books and got some kind of perverted kick out of sending them. They were pretty horrible. Sick, I think you’d call them. You know, sex stuff.”
Neither Newman nor Sadler wanted him to elaborate and Sadler made it clear. “Enough of that for now. Let’s get into the building and see if Oliver Guinane is inside. He might be lying dead for all we know.”
Without a further word from any of them, all seemingly lost in thought save for Coates who began to whistle quietly, they made their way towards the agency building. As they entered the glass doors of my old agency, I saw one of the cops Simmons had sent in earlier coming from the lift. He saluted the commander and began telling the group something, a finger jabbing upwards as if to indicate the top offices. I hoped they’d managed to bring Ollie round. I also hoped he wasn’t badly hurt.
Although I’d turned to watch Newman and his detectives enter the building, I still hadn’t moved from the spot. Maybe I was bewildered by what I truly wished was the last revelation in a very traumatic week.
Moker. Alexandra Moker. A woman. Even when I’d used her body for my own purposes I didn’t have a clue. Was there supposed to be a difference, should a cuckoo spirit feel the physical variation between a man or woman without sight of those differences? I honestly had no idea, and right then it was of no great importance to me. I just wondered why I’d so naturally assumed Moker was a man.
I remembered the mortuary earlier that day—God, was it the same day? All right, it might be after midnight, but it was still today’s night as far as I was concerned. When, alone in the mortuary, Moker had molested a female cadaver, did that mean she was a lesbian? But then she had commandeered a young woman that evening and gone off with the debauched men for sex. There had also been a previous female victim. My guess was that her sexuality meant nothing to her because there had probably never been an opportunity to make love with either male or female. Despite her necrophilia, I still felt pity for her.
It occurred to me that my confusion over her sex was for a far simpler reason. When she had arrived at the morgue, her boss had asked whose grubby apron had been left in the corpse room, and her co-worker, who was about to leave, had pointed a thumb over his shoulder at Moker and replied; “Alec’s”.
Only he hadn’t said “Alec’s” at all. He’d replied “Alex”, short for Alexandra. That’s how I’d made the mistake in the beginning; also I’d expected the serial killer to be a man, as had the police themselves. She even walked like a man!
My melancholy gave way to numbness. Moker had been a monster in every sense of the word. But her life had been miserable, her birth had been hideous. No excuse for the odious things she’d done, but… but…
I would have wept for the woman called Alexandra Moker that night. But lately, I’d wept too much.
46
After returning to Primrose and Andrea and making sure they were okay—they were both asleep in Andrea’s and my bed, front door securely locked, a policeman keeping guard on the doorstep, the bedroom door locked too—I wandered. And have wandered ever since.
Literally as a lost soul, I drifted through the city, day and night. I observed people, almost living their sorrows with them. I eavesdropped on conversations and heated debates, even watched couples making love (no pervy sexual thing for me this last one, because sex or desire no longer played any part in my make-up; rather it was a personal wish to see men and women bonding in the most intimate way possible, a need to feel their commitment to one another at its strongest—yet too often all I sensed was their lust). I think I was just searching for love in this sad old world of ours and, yes, I did find it and it wasn’t rare. It was in most people, young and old—especially in these two extremes, in fact—and in those of middle years as I had been. Sounds corny, I know, but it was a great comfort to me.
I experienced everything in a fresh and new way, and every detail was of interest to me. It was the same feeling you get immediately after you’ve recovered from a serious or debilitating illness, only this was a hundred times more intense. I sat in parks and watched people, muffled up in the cold, pass by, momentarily sensing their feelings, their thoughts. I was especially fond of watching children in school playgrounds, because their unbounded zest for life when they were playing touched me deeply. If only you could see their colourful and vivacious auras.
Some animals sensed me, others didn’t. Cats were particularly sensitive to my presence whereas most dogs became confused, often afraid. Birds deliberately ignored me when I sat on park benches, coming close to peck at insects or any breadcrumbs they might find, yet never invading my space. It was as if they were aware of me, but it was of no concern to them, I was neither a threat nor a means of more food.*
*Incidentally, animals also have souls. I’ve watched them leave the bodies of dogs and cats run over in the streets (happens a lot in the city) or when they die naturally (cats nearly always find some secluded spot to die in, whereas dogs like to have their owners close by). And their little souls don’t rise up into the “heavens”, but, like ours, they evaporate just moments after leaving the dead body (if they don’t, if they drift away rather than vanishing, then a new ghost has been created). Yep, there are ghost-animals too. It’s the same with people, which is why ghosts always seem melancholy—they’re lost, you see. Other ghosts, like my father (I learned all this from him when he next came to me), come back from another dimension, but only to visit and never for very long. Anyway, it was he who explained how animals and human souls vanish rather than rise as if on a journey to the sky. The only exceptions, he told me, were birds, whose small spirits did float skywards, but only because that was what they knew best.
One day, I dropped by Westminster Cathedral. It must have been a Sunday morning—I’d lost all sense of time by then—because a High Mass was in progress. When I walked out later I found I was relieved of the guilt, baggage—never a burden, but ever a nag—I’d carried around with me as a pathetic Catholic (in common with many other Catholics) for far too many years. I’d discovered that pomp and ceremony were not essential to belief, although the ritual and symbolism were necessary for many and essential for some. Individual or collective worship were both right—naturally a combination of both was the ideal because neither one precluded the other—and a person was free to choose without persuasion or dictates by those who had set themselves up as conduits to God.