“What do you mean?”
The other detective leered and Arthur was assaulted by a venting of his rancid breath. “Obliging little cow swallowed ampersand in a prophylactic. We’ll strain it out of her later.”
“That’s horrible.”
“That’s life, mate. We weren’t all born with a silver spoon up our jacksie.”
Streater looked up from his conversation with Peter. “Everything OK, chief? You seem worried.”
Arthur was stuttering his way into a reply when a train’s worth of people emerged from the exit gates, last amongst them a dark-haired woman just on the cusp of middle age.
“Here we go,” grunted one of the policemen. “I’d recognize that wiggle anywhere.”
Peter seemed even sweatier and more nervous than before. “No,” he muttered. “Something’s wrong.”
Streater shot the man a sharp look. “What?”
“Look at her. Something’s up.”
They all stared as the woman moved across the floor. It was as though she was drunk but trying her best to walk in a straight line, staggering under some appalling strain. As she drew closer, they saw that her skin had turned a violent shade of pink.
“Oh God.” Peter was whimpering. “Oh God.”
“What is it?” Streater snapped. “What’s happening?”
All the blood had drained from his face. “I think it’s split inside her. If she’s ingested that amount of raw ampersand… Christ knows what’ll happen to her.”
None of the men, not even the policemen, had any answer to this. They all just stood in silence and watched the inevitable unfold.
The woman staggered again, stumbled forward and lurched onto the ground. Arthur made a move to help but Streater grabbed his arm to hold him back.
A couple of customs staff had seen the woman fall and hurried over but it was already too late. Her face grew more florid, seeming to bloat and swell far beyond its natural size. Shiny, bulbous boils rose upon her face, and even from a few meters away, Arthur could see that they were filled with lurid pus, moving and squirming with some life of their own. Her body seemed wracked with a tremendous pressure from within, shuddering like a blocked water pipe after the taps have been left running. Once or twice, Arthur tried to turn away but failed to do so, morbidly riveted by the spectacle of it.
The woman was still shaking. A keening, piteous moan escaped her as a crowd began to gather, impotent yet transfixed.
At the end, Arthur’s view was mercifully obscured, but he heard the sound she made when she died. One could hardly miss it — it was the hearty impact of a water balloon on a summer’s day — and he saw the aftermath, too, the spreading pool of bubblegum pink which crept along the station floor, staining the stone with ampersand.
Peter was retching into his handkerchief. Virtue and Mercy were shaking their heads in grim disbelief. But Mr. Streater only smirked. “Just goes to show,” he said. “Turns out you really can have too much of a good thing.”
And he smiled his secret smile.
Chapter 20
Often, late at night, when I can’t get to sleep, I wonder how Jasper did it.
I don’t suppose he even found it difficult. Something like that… it would get to me. It would prey on my mind. But Jasper? It never seemed to bother him in the slightest.
You’ve probably already guessed who he phoned the moment he left me at the Eye. And you can imagine how he sweet-talked her into coming out for lunch. Somewhere posh, he would have said, somewhere swanky. My treat. And the girl, already flattered by his attentions, by the gentlemanly way in which he had conducted himself and the evident sincerity of his intentions, would have been helpless at the invitation.
Later, after it was done, Jasper told me that he had never laid a finger on her. But we know the truth. We know what kind of man he was. We know he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.
You’ll have to forgive me if I sound bitter. Given my condition, I actually harbor surprisingly little resentment, but there’s something about this part of my story which never fails to enrage me. Something also in the fact that if I’d just been that little bit sharper, that tiny bit more alert, I might have been able to stop it completely.
So Jasper called her up, asked her out for an early lunch and she agreed. She would have scavenged some makeup from her colleagues and spent an eternity in the ladies’ before coming to meet him, her heart pitter-patting at the prospect of another unburdened by baggage, kinks of hang-ups. Jasper would have been waiting punctually outside the office and taken her to a restaurant which he knew should impress her but which he would never dream of visiting in the normal way. It had to be somewhere no one knew him. It had to be somewhere he wouldn’t be recognized.
He would have listened to her chatter as the wine arrived, asked about the office gossip, nodded politely on hearing that her boss had called in sick that morning and pantomimed interest when she told him about the fat woman in the basement. He would even have put up with her gauche flirtations during the starter, and it would only have been when she left the table to powder her nose that he would finally have made his move.
To a man like him, it probably didn’t even feel like a moral decision. A circular silver pill dropped discreetly into her drink. It would have effervesced briefly, then dissolved, and by the time Barbara came back to the table she would never have guessed that anything had transpired at all.
But it’s the thought of what must have happened next, once the meal was over and the pill had set itself to work — it’s that and the terrible betrayal it represents which, as I write, makes me sick to my stomach.
At the time all this was happening, I was ushering Abbey into the Machen Ward and presenting her to the pitiful shadow of my grandfather. The place seemed quieter than ever. The bed opposite Granddad, occupied the last time I’d visited by a portly bald man whose face had been covered almost entirely with burst blood vessels, lay conspicuously empty.
We found a couple of chairs and lowered ourselves down beside him.
“Granddad,” I said. “I’d like you to meet Abbey. My girlfriend.”
I turned to check that the description of her was OK to find my landlady staring at the old bastard in disbelief. “I know him,” she said.
“What?”
“I know him,” she said again.
“You can’t. That’s impossible.”
“Henry, I’ve met him before.”
“When?”
“Through the real estate agent. He was the man who sold me the flat.”
She told me too much and in too much detail for me ever to believe that she had imagined it or that she was making the whole thing up. She told me how they’d met when she’d looked around the property for the first time, how they’d hit it off straightaway, even if (and there are no surprises here) she was unable to shake the suspicion that the old man was flirting with her. She’d told him a bit about her life, how she was looking to buy her first home and that she might take in a lodger to make the mortgage. Apparently, Granddad had said that he’d taken a liking to her, and in the end he accepted her offer even though it was considerably less than others he received.
It was like he had chosen her. That was how Abbey put it. It was as though he had singled her out.
“What’s going on?” Abbey asked once she had finished.
I didn’t have an answer for her but in the end I managed a shrug and a lopsided smile all the same. “Listen,” I said, “I know an absolutely dreadful cafe just down the corridor. Can I buy you lunch?”