“I never really thought. About forty, forty-five, I suppose. Pretty old. It’s just that he had this lined face, you know, rough-hewn, like, lines from the edges of the nose and the mouth.” She drew them with her fingers on her own face, then she shuddered. “It was awful, Sarah. It was like going through the whole thing again, but I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to.”
“What happened next?”
“Laura brought me out of it.”
“Did you tell the police what he looked like?”
Kirsten sipped some Scotch and glanced toward the bar. Things were coming into clearer focus now; her feet were touching the ground.
“Not yet. Laura’s going to phone them and send a report.”
“Are you sure you’re telling me everything?” Sarah asked.
“Why?”
“You sound vague, and you’ve got that shifty look on your face. I’ve known you long enough to tell when you’re holding something back. What is it?”
Kirsten paused and swirled her drink in her glass before answering. “There was something else…just an impression. I can’t really be sure.”
“What was it?”
“When he put the gag in my mouth, I was too busy struggling, trying to catch my breath, to really notice at the time.”
“Notice what?”
“The smell. There was a smell of fish. You know, like at the seaside.”
“Fish?”
Kirsten nodded. “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t remember it until I’d left her office, when I was coming here to meet you.”
“Why don’t you phone her?”
Kirsten shrugged. “Like I said, it’s probably not important.”
“But that’s not for you to decide.”
Kirsten toyed with her cigarette in the large blue ashtray, shaping the end in one of its grooves. She felt herself starting to drift again like the smoke that curled and twisted in front of her. “I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems that I keep feeding them bits of my memory, you know, things I’ve had sweated out of me, and nothing happens. They’re so impersonal, just a big bureaucratic machine. I mean, two more girls have been killed since my…two. I can’t explain myself, Sarah, not yet, but it’s me and him. I feel I’ve got it in me to find him. It’s as if he’s inside me and I’m the only one who can flush him out.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ! Kirstie. If you ask me you’re turning a bit batty. It must be all that solitude and country air.” She put her hand on Kirsten’s arm again. “You really should tell the police everything you can remember. Like you said, he’s killed two women already, and there’s bound to be more. People like him don’t stop till they’re caught, you know.”
“Do you think I don’t know that,” said Kirsten, pulling her arm away angrily. “Do you think I don’t feel for those women? I have to live what they died.”
“Come again?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry if I seem so touchy about it. I can’t explain. I’m not even sure what I mean myself.”
Kirsten sipped some more Scotch and looked around the pub again. The people looked indistinct; their conversations were just meaningless sounds. Sarah changed the subject to shopping.
As she half-listened and let herself be lulled by the buzz of talk around her, Kirsten came to a decision. People didn’t understand her, it seemed. Not even Sarah. People didn’t understand how personal it was. Not just for her, but for Margaret Snell and Kathleen Shannon too. Doctors, police…what did they know? In the future, she would have to be careful just how much she told them.
When she tasted that foul rag he had stuffed in her mouth and smelled his rough stubby fingers, she recognized the salt-water taste as well as the fishy odor. The rag tasted as if it had been dipped in the sea. Wasn’t there, then, a good chance that he had come from a coastal town?
And there was something else. Not only had she remembered the smell, but when he had thrown her to the ground and put the rag in her mouth as she stared up at him in the moonlight, his mouth had been moving. He had been talking to her. She couldn’t hear any sounds or words, but she knew he had spoken, and if she could bring that back, there was no knowing what it might tell her about him. It might even lead her to him.
39 Susan
As Susan approached the Brown Cow at lunchtime on the third day, she saw two white factory vans parked in front, and before she had even got near the entrance, two men came out of the pub and walked over to them. It was impossible to be sure from such a distance, but one of them matched the image in her memory: low, dark fringe, the thick eyebrows meeting in the middle. She had to get closer to see if he had deep lines on his face and, most of all, she needed to hear his voice.
When they started their vans and pulled out, she followed on foot. At least she could see which way they turned as they drove down the lane. If they went left, they would be on their way to the factory, and if they carried on down to the main road, they would be off making a delivery somewhere. She was in luck. They turned left.
Sue hurried after them. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but there was no point in hanging around the Brown Cow any longer. When she reached the turning, the vans had already pulled up outside the loading bays a hundred yards beyond the mesh gates, and the drivers were nowhere in sight. She walked along the street as far as the row of shops. She couldn’t just wander through the factory gates and go looking for the man; nor could she sit in the café where the inquisitive woman would be on duty. What could she do?
Before she had time to come up with a plan, she noticed the man walk out of the glass doors of the office building. He seemed to be slipping a small envelope of some kind into his pocket. A pay packet, perhaps? Whatever it was, he looked as though he had finished for the day. If he was a driver, the odds were that he had just returned from an overnight run, padded his time sheet with an hour or so at the Brown Cow, and was now on his way home.
He was walking toward her, only about forty yards away now on the dirt track that led out of the factory. She had nowhere to hide. She couldn’t just stand there in the street until he came level with her. What if he recognized her? She had changed a lot since their last meeting, lost a lot of weight, though her wig was about the same length as her hair had been then. Surely he couldn’t have got a much clearer impression of her looks than she had of his? But she couldn’t stand rooted to the spot.
There was only one thing to do. She rushed forward and ducked into the newsagent’s. She needed her morning papers anyway, as she had been so absorbed in her new routine that she hadn’t even spent her usual hour in the Church Street café. She hadn’t looked for news of Keith, and she was still feeling nervous about the Grimley investigation, though no one had knocked on her door in the middle of the night yet.
The newspapers were arranged in small, overlapping piles on a low shelf just inside the window, below the rack of magazines. From there, as she pretended to make her selection with her back turned to the newsagent, she could get a closer look at the man as he went past. She bent and pretended to leaf through the stack, as if she were scanning the front pages for the best headlines, when suddenly he appeared right outside. He didn’t walk past as she had expected. Instead, he patted his pocket, turned and came inside.
Sue kept her back to the counter and examined the Radio Times and Women’s Own in the rack above the papers.
“Afternoon, Greg,” she heard the woman say. “In for some baccy, I suppose?”
“Yes, please.” The man’s voice sounded muffled and Sue couldn’t hear him clearly.
“Usual?”
“Aye. Oh, and I’ll have a box of matches, too, please, love. Swan Vestas.”