‘I don’t want your money.’ He spoke in a weary voice.
He took the box from under his arm and placed it on the table. Gently taking out Kate’s head, he positioned it next to his and stood before the two faces. They were indistinguishable.
Sarah Glyde backed as far as she could go, stopping by the wall that abutted the Bell Steps.
The heads had identical bone structures: a straight nose with a lump below the bridge and square chins and wide mouths and full lips over which played the ghost of a smile. The gender difference was not apparent beyond a thickness of neck and an Adam’s apple on the newer sculpture.
The real difference was in the mastery of the clay: over the decades the artist had developed a deeper relationship with her material. The first head had the strained perfection of a younger and less confident sculptor: she had cut and smeared, pushed and pummelled to achieve verisimilitude and technically it was exceptional, but it lacked a soul. The clay for Jack’s head had been moulded at its maker’s behest: coaxed and massaged to her will. While Jack’s jawline was sharper than his mother’s, it was fashioned with a lighter feel.
Sarah dropped the handset. It hit the table, bounced to the floor and chips of plastic flew across the tiles. The casing lay at Jack’s feet, the light still glowing.
‘She was beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘She had seen my advert for pottery classes in the newspaper but didn’t want to join a group. She insisted she was musical, not artistic. She commissioned me to make her likeness as a surprise. We had several sessions: I sketched her first. Her son had to come with her so I gave him clay to keep him busy. He didn’t make soldiers or sausages like most kids; he created a half-naked woman with folded arms. I recognized the statue by Karel Vogel beside the Great West Road. He had paid attention to what he saw; it was an incredible likeness. We fired it.’ She was talking to Kate’s head. ‘I don’t think she realized how talented he was. She was astonished.’
Sarah bent over his mother, her palms tenderly cupping the face, not making contact, echoing its shape with butterfly movements. She went on: ‘I saw you in the street. I wanted you to model for me, but before I could get your attention, you had gone. When you appeared on my doorstep with your boss I thought you were a ghost. I worked from photographs and memory, but I was certain I had been here before. I knew the planes of your face, the way the light plays on your cheekbones. I knew you.’
‘Why did you kill her?’
Jack had asked his mother’s murderer this question as he watched Miss Thoroughgood chalk up sums on the blackboard, as he walked London according to the street atlas, as he drove his train beneath London. When he was with the Leaning Woman.
Sarah Glyde was as tall as Jack. He remembered his mother as tall, but in the case notes he read she was five foot six inches. He was six foot. If his mummy were here, he would tower over her. Sarah Glyde had easily overpowered her.
For years he had scoured the streets for the monster he would capture and slay. This wiry woman in her fifties with a grip of steel was that monster. Sarah Glyde’s head was cadaverous in the angled light; a bluish vein pulsated on her forehead, her hair escaped in coiling springs from a careless bun. Her bones would snap with a mild blow. The knife would slice into her with little resistance and she would feel a cold pain and look, uncomprehending, at the quiet pumping stream.
Jack swallowed hard.
For a moment he longed for her to hold him, to grip his throat, squeeze down on his neck and, as she had made a head identical to Katherine Rokesmith’s, by killing him she would reunite him with her.
You killed my mummy.
He had dreamed of uttering these words. He had spoken them into the night, whispered them in spare rooms, from rooftops, in tool cupboards in the homes of his Hosts. Yet faced with the mind like his own, Jack’s lips were as immobile as clay.
She came towards him and he lifted the knife.
‘You have made a mistake.’ She flinched from the blade. If he used the cutter he would not have to touch her, just draw the wire through her flesh, like butter.
‘You told the police you didn’t know Kate.’
‘It was her secret.’ With an unsteady hand she supported his clay cheek, refining the bone beneath the left eye. ‘They would have asked questions I could not answer. She had taken the piece away and wasn’t coming back. She never paid me and I did not want her husband to cover it, he was going through enough. Then when it was he who murdered her, there was no point.’
She began on his other cheek. Jack had not thought the head could look more like himself than it already did. His own strength seemed to ebb as, retreating from her fear, Sarah Glyde smoothed and stroked the clay.
‘I talk to her. I talk to all my pieces. I liked her. Why would I kill her?’
‘The police asked about your car?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t lie.’ He would pierce her heart. Tuck the blade under the left side of her rib cage and give a firm push.
‘I couldn’t drive.’
‘A 1964 blue Ford Anglia?’
‘I don’t even know what one looks like.’
It was a while since Jack had seen someone so frightened, but any gratification he felt was dull, for she had not expressed remorse. He could not kill her until she said she was sorry.
‘What has that to do with me?’
‘It was registered in your name. After 1981 no more road tax payments made. I know a lot of facts about that year.’
‘How could that be?’ She clasped her hands under her armpits as if to warm them; the stove had gone out. Beads of perspiration glistened on her bone-pale forehead and her lower jaw quivered. She was lying.
‘S. A. I. Glyde? Sarah Annabel, Isabel, Anne, Ingrid… am I close?’
‘My initials are S. M. Glyde, Sarah Matilda and my mother’s were C. E. for Clarissa Emma. She couldn’t drive.’ She got up. ‘I did not kill Kate Rokesmith and nor did my mother. Can we stop this?’
She was hiding something, busying herself paring strips from a block, dragging the wire through the clay. He pulled up a stool and sat down at the table. The lines converged, the shapes coalesced; the air shifted. Day by day she had turned his mother into a statue.
Jack raised the blade, the fingers of his other hand curling around the clay cutter.
The clay had rolled beneath his palms, thinning as he pressed down with all the weight a four-year-old could muster. Too thin. He had bunched it up and started again until it was long and quite thin, then worked at the legs, the folded arms, the head. When he visited again she had put it out ready for him; moistened by a damp rag it was soft. When the Lady was finished she had got a box for him to take her home in.
His mummy had said he could not keep it. Their visits were a secret.
‘I had no reason to want her dead,’ Sarah repeated, addressing the heads. ‘If I had been here, in my studio, I might have saved her. If she had cried out, I might have heard. In the summer I hear people down there. But I was at my brother’s and when I got back, it was pandemonium. The streets and the river were teeming with police. There was even a helicopter. I had to argue to get into my house.’
‘You told the police you were at the dentist.’
‘My brother is a dentist. Antony has always done my teeth.’
Jack was floating somewhere on the other side of the space. Only the heads had substance.
‘For God’s sake, not like that!’ Tony cradled the ripped box as if it were a hamster that he loved and Jonathan saw that although Tony made a fuss of him, he did not like him. He had supposed until then that all grown-ups liked children.