‘When was it in the paper?’
‘Four or five days ago. Mags, have you still got it? I read it and thought – I wonder if that’s Marianne. But I’m always putting two and two together and making fifty-eight. Mags, the Gazette, it was, have you got it?’
‘On the pile,’ she said, pointing to the small round table next to the slot machine. Geoff got up and wobbled over to the stack of papers upon it. He riffled through them with surprisingly quick flicks of his fingers.
‘Got it,’ he said. He came back to them, and put the paper in front of David. Arnie snatched it up, licked his thumb, then turned the first page and pointed to the top of page three. It was a small article, only one column, with no picture.
Wiltshire police are asking for witnesses to come forward regarding an alleged sexual assault that took place outside Wootton Bassett library on the night of Thursday 15th October.
If you were in the vicinity or have any information that you think might be relevant, please contact—
David stopped reading. ‘No. That’s not her. She wasn’t assaulted.’ He worked backwards in his head, checking the dates. This attack had happened while Marianne was away on the island. The man she had faced down had escalated his game. He felt a strong urge to tell her. ‘I have to talk to Marianne.’
‘You sure it wasn’t her?’ Arnie folded up the newspaper.
‘Certain. Look at the dates. She was attacked the week before. But she stood up to him, and he ran off.’
‘Ahh,’ said Arnie. ‘I knew it. I knew it. Same bloke, then. That explains why she ran away. All these poor women getting raped right here in our town.’
‘She wasn’t raped,’ said David.
‘Rapist living in Wootton Bassett and nobody tells us, do they? You’d think they’d give men the chance to deal with it themselves, protect their women. He could be out there, doing it again, right now, and he loves that library, doesn’t he?’ There was a malicious enjoyment to Arnie’s voice.
David stood up. Marianne was in the library, the quiet, bright library, a shining beacon in the darkness. The ugliness of the world was becoming so very clear to him. It had been moving into focus since he talked to Hamish at the funeral.
It’s all so wrong, Hamish had said. Criminal out on the streets, you know. I found out a paedophile lives down the road from us. Rebecca’s very sensitive to things like that; how can she relax, knowing he’s in the street too? We never had kids because of people like that. I know it’s really upsetting her.
How horrible to be in that situation, David had thought. He remembered feeling guilty over how relieved he was not to be in that situation himself.
But that situation was everywhere. That blackness of broken, selfish, dangerous souls had spread all over the world, and nobody was doing anything about it. ‘Pliers, that’s what you need,’ said Geoff. ‘Take a pair of pliers to the bastard’s testicles. Doing that to your wife.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ said David.
‘You don’t want to believe everything Marianne says,’ said Arnie. ‘She was always a good liar, that one. All of them are. And they all leave in the end.’
David strode over to Mags, laid a ten-pound note on the bar and met her gaze. She gave him a small smile, apologetic. ‘You don’t need any cubes now,’ she said. ‘Look at you.’
He left The Cornerhouse and ran for the library.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘Can I just say…’ Patty hesitates in the doorway. ‘That we all think you’re really brave and when you feel ready to go back out on the front desk again, you just let us know.’
‘Great,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I’m still a bit…’
‘Yes, of course.’ She looks at the kettle on the work counter, as if it is deeply interesting. Eventually she points to it. ‘You want?’
‘No, thanks Patty.’
‘Okay. I’ll be out the front, then.’
‘Give me a shout if there’s a rush,’ I tell her, safe in the knowledge that a rush of customers at 7:45 on a Thursday evening is the most unlikely of things to happen in this library.
‘Okay. You do your—’ She points at the spreadsheet I have open on the computer screen. She’s in her sixties and says she’ll never get comfortable with electronic systems. I have always liked that about her. She is determined to remain immune to modern life, and her vision of the world is intact, frozen, formed from Coronation Street, Panorama and the Silver Jubilee. I can feel, in her presence, that maybe everything isn’t out of control after all.
After she has left the back office, I switch from the spreadsheet to Google once more.
The news has become a code to crack. I start every day on the BBC website and I hunt for articles, through the Guardian and the Independent, on through CNN and Al Jazeera, even the Sun and the Star and the Daily Mail. The stories give me clues as to whether Moira escaped the island, where she might be, how her power to affect men is changing everything.
Because around the world, men are changing. They are becoming heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks. Today, in Kentucky, a fireman rushed into a burning orphanage and saved sixteen children, one after the other. Police think the fire was started deliberately by a serial arsonist who is now operating in the area. Today, in Lancashire, an old man lay down on train tracks and had to be forcibly removed. He had written on his face in indelible ink:
I DON’T WANT THIS
Today, in Kenya, Somalian pirates attacked a holiday resort. They rounded up all the men and divided them into four groups. They killed every member of the smallest group, and kidnapped the men in another. Two groups they left alone. Five men dead, six missing. Forty-eight ignored.
Were these things happening before? Not like this, not in such clear delineations, I don’t think. Or am I catching Amelia’s madness?
I think Amelia knew what unique and special thing she was hiding in that basement. That’s why she named her monster Moira. By doing that she left a clue that was easy to follow. All it took was a quick internet search to find the truth.
I looked up the derivation of the word monster. It comes from Middle English, leading back to a Latin root: monstrum. A portent, an unnatural event. Whatever Moira is, I don’t think she’s unnatural. And if she’s part of the natural order of this world, then that means men are meant to be more important than women.
I click on the bookmark to my favourite page: the Wikipedia entry on the Moirai, the Fates – the Greek idea of incarnations of destiny. Three women who control the threads of life for all men. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. But in Homeric stories and Mycenaean myths there aren’t three women who perform these roles. There is one.
Whenever I consider this, my hands begin to shake. It’s a terrible piece of knowledge to possess.
I look up Lady Worthington on Google. There are many sites that mention her; she is a romantic historical figure, I suppose. I click on one devoted to feminist pioneers:
Born into the heart of the English establishment at the end of the nineteenth century, Lady Amelia Worthington was niece to the fourth Earl of Stanhope, and heir to the Worthington fortune, a trove of priceless Roman artefacts collected in Northern Africa by her father, the Victorian explorer, Lord Percy Worthington.
Upon her father’s death, Lady Amelia used her vast wealth to travel with a freedom and independence that women were just beginning to explore after the end of World War One. She participated in archaeological digs in Egypt, and was a close friend of Lord Carnarvon. After his sudden death in 1923 in Cairo (some say due to the Curse of Tutankhamun, but nowadays widely attributed to blood poisoning), Lady Amelia left Egypt and travelled extensively in Turkey, the Greek Islands, and the Mediterranean. She was heavily involved in the British dig in Thermi, on the island of Lesbos, conducted in 1933, that uncovered extensive pottery and figurine remains from the fourth century BC, along with rich mosaics and impressive sculptures.