Lucky her.
The manhunt continued, but the media interest began to wane. There were rumours that Thorpe could have disguised himself and headed to Northern Ireland — no need of a passport. From there, it would have been straightforward to cross to Ireland proper. The Western Isles was another possibility. Or far to the south, melting into Manchester, Birmingham, or London. His photo was on show at every mainline station, and in shop windows and at bus stops. He had taken around three hundred pounds from the shopkeeper. It was only a matter of time before he struck again.
I started to emerge from my house, as a butterfly from its chrysalis. The neighbours showed little interest. There were no reporters waiting kerbside. But everywhere I went, Thorpe’s eyes stared back at me from all those wanted posters. I felt I would never be free of him. I dreamed often of crashed cars, mangled corpses, stained carpets, shattered ashtrays. I reached into my parents’ drinks cabinet for bottles of whisky and sherry, but found both foul beyond words. One night, I decided to go for a drive. I hadn’t been out of the city since the evening of the crash. I found myself steering the same route, slowing at that curve in the road, headlights picking out the remaining scraps of police tape. From a distance, there was no other sign that anything had happened here. I drove on, stopping at the all-night supermarket on my way back into the city.
Of course he was waiting for me, but I couldn’t know that. I parked the car in the driveway. I lifted out the bag of shopping. I unlocked the door of the house. I closed it after me, placing the bunch of keys on the table in the hall, the same way my father and mother would have done. There was a draught, meaning an open window. But I still wasn’t thinking as I carried the shopping into the kitchen. Glass crunched underfoot. There was glass in the sink, too, and spread across the worktop. The window frame was gaping. I put down the shopping and checked the den. Someone had raided the drinks cabinet. I switched on the light in the living room. He was lying on my father’s bed. The whisky bottle was on the floor next to him, emptied. He had his hands behind his head. He had twisted his body to face the doorway.
“Hello again,” he said.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
He had removed the stitches from his scalp. The wound hadn’t quite healed. There was a baseball-cap resting on his chest. He placed it to one side as he began to swing his legs over the side of the bed.
“I missed you,” he said. “This where you sleep?”
“I sleep upstairs.”
“That’s what I reckoned. Took a look around, hope you don’t mind.”
“The window’s broken.”
“Windows can be fixed, Richard.”
“How did you find me?”
“Your old man’s still listed in the phone book — Reverend Jamieson.” Thorpe wagged a finger. “Time you did something about that.”
“You’ve been killing people.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Why?”
There was that smile again, as if he knew some joke no one else in the world did. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said, “when they took me to hospital, cleaned me up and had me checked. And the cops, asking me questions but never quite the right questions. Every time those doors swung open, I reckoned I was done for. But they patched me up and then they let me walk right out of there.” He was pointing towards the doorway. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, and it seemed to me that he was offering me the chance to escape, indicating the direction I should take. But I was too busy listening to his story.
“It struck me then,” he went on, “that I could do it again.”
“Kill, you mean?”
He nodded, eyes fixed on mine. “Again and again and again. So tell me, Mr Richard Jamieson, how does that square with your ‘sanctity of life’? What does the Bible tell you about that, eh?”
When I didn’t say anything, he raised himself from the bed and walked towards me.
“Is this where your old man died?” he asked.
I nodded.
He was very close to me now. He had forgotten his baseball cap. He squeezed past me without making eye contact. I followed him into the hall. He turned left into the den.
“This where he spent all his time?”
I nodded again, but he had his back to me, so I cleared my throat. “Yes,” I said.
“And now it’s all yours. We’re not so different, you and me, Richard.”
“So biology would have us believe.”
“The old human DNA... go back far enough, we’d even be related, am I right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Darwin says the apes, the Bible says Adam and Eve. Do you think Adam and Eve were apes, Richard?”
“I don’t know.” He had turned to face me. “What are you doing here?” I asked him again. “The police are looking for you.”
“But they’re not very clever — we both know that.”
“How clever do they need to be?”
He answered with a twitch of the mouth. “I’ve been thinking about you, Richard. Papers have been giving you a hard time. They reckon you should have let me top myself. How do you feel about that?” He was resting the base of his spine against my father’s desk, one foot crossed over the other, arms folded. When I didn’t answer, he repeated the question.
“Why do you need to know?” I asked him instead.
“Does there always have to be a reason? I’d have thought you’d have learned that much, despite all these bloody books.” He nodded towards the shelves. “I’ll tell you why I wanted to see you again — to thank you properly.” He gave a bow from the waist, still with arms folded. Then he eased himself upright. “Now, if you’ll excuse me...”
“What are you going to do?”
“You know what I’m going to do, Richard.”
“You’re going to kill again?”
“And again and again and again.” His voice was almost musical. “And all thanks to you and your sanctity of life. Learned from your father, I’m guessing, years before you watched him wither and die. Were there any words of comfort, Richard? Did he meet his maker with a happy and a fulsome heart? Or had he twigged by then that it’s all a joke?” He waved his arm towards the books. “All of it.”
He waited for my answer, then gave up, brushing past me again as he stepped into the hall.
“I can’t let you go,” I told him.
“Good for you.”
“You know I can’t.”
I had lifted the bottle of sherry from the cabinet. There was less than an inch of liquid left inside. I was holding it by the neck. He stood there in the hall, waiting with his back to me, head angled a little as if consulting some hidden force beyond the ceiling.
“I know you can’t,” was all he said. It was as if he’d become the passenger and I the driver.
I lay down on my father’s bed that night, a baseball-cap resting on my chest. Was I hero or villain? I’m hoping you’ll tell me. I’m hoping one of you will tell me. I need to know. I really need to be told.
Again and again and again.
Acknowledgements
THE VERY LAST DROP by Ian Rankin © 2009. First appeared on the Royal Blind website, www.royalblind.org. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robinson Literary Agency Ltd.