He was at the restaurant half an hour before the rest of the party. He sat at the bar, sipping a Scotch and then another, thinking of people who must do so every night in preference to sitting alone at home, though might some of them be trying to avoid doing something worse? He was glad when his party arrived, Annette and her husband, Jackie and her new boyfriend, even though Annette’s greeting as he stood up disconcerted him. “Are you all right, Mr. Foulsham?” she said, and he felt unpleasantly wary until he realised that she must be referring to his limp.
By the time the turkey arrived at the table, the party had opened a third bottle of wine and the conversation had floated loose. “What was he like, Mr. Foulsham,” Jackie’s boyfriend said, “the feller you put away?”
Annette coughed delicately. “Mr. Foulsham may not want to talk about it.”
“It’s all right, Annette. Perhaps I should. He was—” Foulsham said, and trailed off, wishing that he’d taken advantage of the refuge she was offering. “Maybe he was just someone whose mind gave way.”
“I hope you’ve no regrets,” Annette’s husband said. “You should be proud.”
“Of what?”
“Of stopping the killing. He won’t kill anyone else.”
Foulsham couldn’t argue with that, and yet he felt uneasy, especially when Jackie’s boyfriend continued to interrogate him. If Fishwick didn’t matter, as Annette had insisted when Foulsham was closing the shop, why was everyone so interested in hearing about him? He felt as though they were resurrecting the murderer, in Foulsham’s mind if nowhere else. He tried to describe Fishwick, and related as much of his own experience of the trial as he judged they could stomach. All that he left unsaid seemed to gather in his mind, especially the thought of Fishwick extracting the veins from his arms.
Annette and her husband gave him a lift home. He meant to invite them up for coffee and brandy, but the poodles started yapping the moment he climbed out of the car. “Me again, Mrs. Hutton,” he slurred as he hauled himself along the banister. He switched on the light in his main room and gazed at the landscapes on the wall, but his mind couldn’t grasp them. He brushed his teeth and drank as much water as he could take, then he huddled under the blankets, willing the poodles to shut up.
He didn’t sleep for long. He kept wakening with a stale rusty taste in his mouth. He’d drunk too much, that was why he felt so hot and sticky and closed in. When he eased himself out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, the dogs began to bark. He rinsed out his mouth but was unable to determine if the water which he spat into the sink was discolored. He crept out of the bathroom with a glass of water in each hand and crawled shivering into bed, trying not to grind his teeth as pictures which he would have given a good deal not to see rushed at him out of the dark.
In the morning he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He lay in the creeping sunlight, too exhausted either to sleep or to get up, until he heard the year’s sole Sunday delivery sprawl on the doormat. He washed and dressed gingerly, cursing the poodles, whose yapping felt like knives emerging from his skull, and stumbled down to the hall.
He lined up the new cards on his mantelpiece, where there was just enough room for them. Last year he’d had to stick cards onto a length of parcel tape and hang them from the cornice. This year cards from businesses outnumbered those from friends, unless tomorrow restored the balance. He was signing cards in response to some of the Sunday delivery when he heard Mrs. Hutton and the poodles leave the house.
He limped to the window and looked down on her. The two leashes were bunched in her left hand, her right was clenched on her stick. She was leaning backward as the dogs ran her downhill, and he had never seen her look so crippled. He turned away, unsure why he found the spectacle disturbing. Perhaps he should catch up on his sleep while the dogs weren’t there to trouble it, except that if he slept now he might be guaranteeing himself another restless night. The prospect of being alone in the early hours and unable to sleep made him so nervous that he grabbed the phone before he had thought who he could ask to visit.
Nobody had time for him today. Of the people ranked on the mantelpiece, two weren’t at home, two were fluttery with festive preparations, one was about to drive several hundred miles to collect his parents, one was almost incoherent with a hangover. All of them invited Foulsham to visit them over Christmas, most of them sounding sincere, but that wouldn’t take care of Sunday. He put on his overcoat and gloves and hurried downhill by a route designed to avoid Mrs. Hutton, and bought his Sunday paper on the way to a pub lunch.
The Bloody Mary wasn’t quite the remedy he was hoping for. The sight of the liquid discomforted him, and so did the scraping of the ice cubes against his teeth. Nor was he altogether happy with his lunch; the leg of chicken put him in mind of the process of severing it from the body. When he’d eaten as much as he could hold down, he fled.
The papery sky was smudged with darker clouds, images too nearly erased to be distinguishable. Its light seemed to permeate the city, reducing its fabric to little more than cardboard. He felt more present than anything around him, a sensation which he didn’t relish. He closed his eyes until he thought of someone to visit, a couple who’d lived in the house next to his and whose Christmas card invited him to drop in whenever he was passing their new address.
A double-decker bus on which he was the only passenger carried him across town and deposited him at the edge of the new suburb. The streets of squat houses which looked squashed by their tall roofs were deserted, presumably cleared by the Christmas television shows he glimpsed through windows, and his isolation made him feel watched. He limped into the suburb, glancing at the street names.
He hadn’t realized the suburb was so extensive. At the end of almost an hour of limping and occasionally resting, he still hadn’t found the address. The couple weren’t on the phone, or he would have tried to contact them. He might have abandoned the quest if he hadn’t felt convinced that he was about to come face-to-face with the name which, he had to admit, had slipped his mind. He hobbled across an intersection and then across its twin, where a glance to the left halted him. Was that the street he was looking for? Certainly the name seemed familiar. He strolled along the pavement, trying to conceal his limp, and stopped outside a house.
Though he recognized the number, it hadn’t been on the card. His gaze crawled up the side of the house and came to rest on the window set into the roof. At once he knew that he’d heard the address read aloud in the courtroom. It was where Fishwick had lived.
As Foulsham gazed fascinated at the small high window he imagined Fishwick gloating over the sketches he’d brought home, knowing that the widow from whom he rented the bed-sitter was downstairs and unaware of his secret. He came to himself with a shudder, and stumbled away, almost falling. He was so anxious to put the city between himself and Fishwick’s room that he couldn’t bear to wait for one of the infrequent Sunday buses. By the time he reached home, he was gritting his teeth so as not to scream at the ache in his leg. “Shut up,” he snarled at the alarmed poodles, “or I’ll—” and stumbled upstairs.
The lamps of the city were springing alight. Usually he enjoyed the spectacle, but now he felt compelled to look for Fishwick’s window among the distant roofs. Though he couldn’t locate it, he was certain that the windows were mutually visible. How often might Fishwick have gazed across the city toward him? Foulsham searched for tasks to distract himself—cleaned the oven, dusted the furniture and the tops of the picture frames, polished all his shoes, lined up the tins on the kitchen shelves in alphabetical order. When he could no longer ignore the barking which his every movement provoked, he went downstairs and rapped on Mrs. Hutton’s door.