The Book of You: A Novel (13 page)

I am puzzled that you waited to use that number. I know I need to understand why this is. And then it comes to me. I see the control you can exercise when you want to. You are carefully measuring the doses of what you are doing, plotting your attacks in some careful order that only you understand, making sure they come regularly.

I’ll change my landline and set it to block all calls from hidden numbers.

I’ve been putting all of your things in the old wooden cupboard my father refurbished for me. That’s where the answering machine, with its forty blank messages, will go, too.

Proof is essential. Keep all evidence in a safe place.

Just as I reach for it, the phone rings. I let out a small scream and clamp my lips shut, furious that you’ve got to me again. But you’ve been watching. You know I’m home now; you know I’m listening to that ring. Another unknown caller, I can see on the handset display. I will not answer you.

Despite the sensation of being in a nightmare where I’ve been paralyzed, I fall onto my knees. I tear the phone plug from the connection in the wall before the answering machine can pick up. I cut you off, not giving you the satisfaction of getting through this time, not letting you into my bedroom. I will never let you into my bedroom again.

Tuesday

Tuesday, February 17, 8:05 a.m.

Don’t you have anything better to do? Don’t you get bored, and frozen, standing here morning after morning?

I don’t say these things when I find you outside my front door yet again. I don’t look at you. I make my way steadily toward the taxi.

“Your answering machine seems to be broken, Clarissa. Did you know that, Clarissa?”

If you say my name just one more time, I might punch you. You open the taxi door for me as if you are being courteous and well mannered. Small as I am, I quell my urge to give you a shove.

“I warned you to stay away from that fireman, Clarissa.”

I reach for the handle to shut the door behind me, telling the driver that you aren’t someone I want to share my journey with. He tells you to step away from his car.

“Certainly,” you say to him politely, man to man, as if you are reasonable, though you are still gripping the door and you don’t take your eyes off me. “I was just saying good-bye to my girlfriend. Did you know that when I miss you too much, Clarissa, I look at your photographs?” With that you release the door. It slams hard, all at once. But it isn’t the door’s slam that is ringing in my ears. It is your parting shot.

A
SLIM WHITE-HAIRED
gentlemanly-looking man was sitting behind the blue screen, very straight in his chair, when they filed into Court 12. Lottie’s grandfather.

“The jury will see that on Sunday, July twenty-ninth, at three thirty in the afternoon, a call went from Carlotta Lockyer’s mobile telephone to Mr. John Lockyer’s landline,” said Mr. Morden. “Do you recall the conversation, Mr. Lockyer?”

“Carlotta asked me for fifteen hundred pounds. She sounded scared. Upset. Extremely distressed.”

More external evidence that Lottie had been kidnapped. That she did not want to be where she was and in the company she was in.

Mr. Lockyer bowed his neck and looked down at his hands. The gesture made Clarissa realize how old her own parents were, and that she must protect them from seeing her in pain or grief or fear.

Tuesday, February 17, 12:50 p.m.

I assume that I’m safe, over lunchtime, wandering through the secondhand bookshops in the dusty halls behind the court district’s central street. Surely your morning glimpse of me will be enough for the day. Even so, I am twisting my head all over the place, searching for you. I must look manic, as if I have some kind of nervous tic. I actually catch myself wondering where you are. This scares me even more: it makes me see that there is a danger of my becoming as fixated on you as you are on me. That is what you want, in your constant mission to keep my attention. I have to stop that from happening.

For a few minutes, I succeed. As I approach the court building, I’m thinking only of the new treasure in my hand, a precious volume of Anne Sexton’s
Transformations.
The goblin creature peeping out of the dust jacket is covered by the stallholder’s flowered paper bag, but its face stays with me. It’s that wizened face, tender and disturbing, that I’m thinking about as I walk. I’m not thinking of you at all. But then I see you standing just outside the revolving doors, and you are all I’m thinking of.

My vision is more acute. Everything is vivid. The sounds grow louder. A white prison van glides by; its exhaust fumes make the inside of my nose burn.

As if in slow motion, I see Robert rounding the corner from the opposite end of the road. He’s sixty feet away.

Passing you will be unavoidable. I make myself approach the revolving doors.

Robert is fifty feet away.

I am praying you will do nothing to make Robert notice you, do nothing to show there is any link between us.

Forty feet away.

Keeping as much distance between us as I can, I step past you. But I say quietly, without looking at you, “If you follow me, I’m telling the security guards.”

Your voice is low but easily discernible. “I’ve seen you as no other man has, Clarissa,” you say, and then I am through the doors.

Robert is out of my view, but I am blindly calculating the relationship between his speed and your position. Twenty feet away. Ten. The screech of a faraway horn makes me jump and look behind me. You walk on, in the opposite direction from Robert, never actually crossing his path.

R
OBERT CAUGHT UP
to her in the foyer, smiling as they put their things onto the X-ray machine belt and chatted together to the guards, who were now like old friends and could barely bring themselves to pass the wand over them, despite the stance of polite readiness they both took up after passing through the metal detector’s arch. She acted as if everything was as normal as it could be, hoping Robert wouldn’t notice that her face was too flushed and her breathing too fast.

C
LARISSA PRESSED THE
top of her mechanical pencil several times to extract more lead.

Mr. Morden was asking an old lady with white hair about something that had happened one hour before Lottie was kidnapped.

“Four men invaded my garden. One of them was kicking my kitchen door. Another shouted at the upstairs window that they’d seen my daughter Dorcas through her bedroom curtains and he knew she was there and could hear him and she’d better come out or they’d break in and get her and that would be worse for her. He said she should have learned that lesson already. He used nasty words.”

“Can you repeat for the jury what the words were?”

“I don’t use those words.”

Mr. Morden appeared suitably chastened but also faintly amused.

“One of them saw me with the phone in my hand, calling the police, and they ran off.

“That door hasn’t closed properly ever since,” she said.

T
HE SNOW FELL
softly as Clarissa and Robert went through the revolving doors at the end of the day. There was no sign of Rafe.

“I wish I could fix that old lady’s door for her,” Robert said.

“You want to help people even when you’re off duty.”

“You’re right about me. I saved a snail from a thrush last weekend. The thrush was dashing it against a stone to try to break its shell.”

“Poor thrush,” Clarissa said. “It was so clever, a tool user, and now it’s probably starved to death.”

“I’d do the same thing again.” He nodded to confirm it.

But they both smiled, as if each of them liked the other for their difference.

They’d only got as far as the bridge when a voice interrupted. “Fireman. Hey. Fireman.”

The voice sounded nothing like Rafe’s, but she still caught her breath for an instant. She stood aside as a young man set himself in front of Robert. “You talked to my sixth form in December about road safety.” The reminder had the air of a challenge.

“I remember you. You came and chatted to me after. Sharif, isn’t it? Live with your grandmother.” Robert planted his feet more firmly, looked at the boy in his direct way, and waited patiently. She was amazed that he could recall all of this a couple months later, after one meeting, in what must have been a large room full of schoolkids.

“I thought about what you said, all those slides you showed. I’m still gonna drive fast.”

“I’ll cut you out alive or dead,” Robert said.

Clarissa felt a chill, imagining Robert’s hands, indifferent, wielding huge instruments, hacking through wrecked metal so the paramedics could get to the human meat tangled inside it.

“Makes no difference to me,” Robert said.

Sharif bit his lip.

“Might make a difference to your grandmother, though.” Robert put out his hand. Sharif shook it. “Thanks for stopping me to chat again and letting me know about your plans.”

Clarissa aimed a good-bye nod at Sharif, knowing he wouldn’t return it, and she and Robert walked on. “Does it really make no difference to you if they’re alive or dead?”

“None at all.”

“What if it were someone you knew?”

“Depends who.”

She smiled but felt another chill. “What if it were me?”

“That would make a difference.”

Tuesday, February 17, 6:20 p.m.

A small rectangular package is propped against the door of my building, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. My name is written by hand in carefully controlled calligraphy. But I know your writing in any guise. My heart pumps harder as I carry it up the stairs to my flat. I drop my bag, not bothering to take off my coat, and fall onto the sofa, pushing aside the string and stripping away the wrapping with shaking hands.

It is as I guess: a miniaturized book about the height and width of a typical postcard. You cut the pages to size by hand out of thick, expensive cream paper. You bound it by hand, too, with heavy thread that you stitched tightly through the holes you cut. It is a beautiful thing. I would admire such an object if you hadn’t made it.

A Collection of Four Fairy Tales, Selected by Rafe Solmes,
the cover says, and below the title,
Limited Edition: Number 1 of 1.
There is a dedication:
For Clarissa, who is beautiful and likes wine.
I look at the contents page. I know every one of these stories all too well. First comes “The Castle of Murder.” Second comes “Blue Beard.”

I open the book to the third of your sequences, “Fitcher’s Bird,” and see that you have underlined a passage.

There was once a wizard who used to take the form of a poor man, and went to houses and begged, and caught pretty girls. No one knew whither he carried them, for they were never seen more.

It is the story of sex crime and murder, repeated and patterned. He has his “type,” too, his victim profile. The targets are young and beautiful, of course. Why else would he be interested in them? It is the story of lovely maidens who disappear mysteriously, as so many fairy tales are, and the titillating question of what happens to them after that blink of an eye when they vanish so completely out of their everyday lives. It is his pretense of vulnerability that allows him to capture them. It is their compassion for a seemingly poor man that makes them susceptible.

All of this, wrapped up in two sentences. The fairy tales set out the template and methods long before any infamous twentieth-century serial killer snatched his first victim.

The fake sling or pretend crutches. The practiced sighs of embarrassment and bravely fought pain as he struggles to load the groceries or box of books into his windowless van. Playing on the woman’s kindness and pity as she walks by. Playing on her romantic hopes, too, as she approaches the handsome stranger and offers to help. Perhaps she even wonders if the next moment will become a story for future children about how their parents met. Perhaps she even thinks of those other stories, the ones that promise good deeds will always be rewarded. He doubles the dose of charm, of course, and flashes that beautiful smile again just before he shoves her in, slams the door, and slaps the chloroform-soaked rag over her face.

I turn to the fourth and last of your stories, “The Robber Bridegroom,” where you have again highlighted the passage you want me to notice above all.

They dragged with them another young girl. They were drunk, and paid no heed to her screams and lamentations. They gave her wine to drink, three glasses full, one glass of white wine, one glass of red, and a glass of yellow, and with this her heart burst in twain. Thereupon they tore off her delicate raiment, laid her on a table, cut her beautiful body in pieces and strewed salt thereon.

A young woman is drugged, stripped, displayed upon a flat surface, and tortured. That is how the sequence goes. Her screams and pleas only make it more exciting; they show that she cannot close her eyes to the terrible new world she has fallen into. They make clear the kind of story it actually is. Sex crime disguised as fairy tale. Sex disguised as cannibalism. Sexual sadism disguised as meat preparation. Gang rape disguised as a band of robbers. That’s how the Grimms got it past their censors, who were not careful readers. The burst heart is not literal. It is not a story of necrophilia. She is not dead before these things are done to her. She is distraught and aware and in terror as they are being done. That is what the burst heart means.

I know how you read these stories, and how you want me to read them. I see how you’ve linked me to the horrifying things these girls suffer, their dreadful fates, in your dedication.

I remember Mr. Morden saying in his opening speech that what happened to Lottie was no fairy tale. But he was wrong. What happened to her was right out of the fairy tales.

Even before I ever set foot in that courtroom, I’d known how important evidence was. My impulse, still, is to be rid of anything you’ve touched, not to have it poisoning the air around me. I want to minimize your presence—in my mind and in my flat. But it’s not an impulse I can give in to.

When it comes to the police, the leaflets are impossibly contradictory.

Call the police immediately—Don’t call the police until you have irrefutable proof.

The police are there to help—Don’t expect the police to be able to do very much.

When it comes to evidence, though, the advice is unanimous: I can’t have too much; I can easily have too little.

I need more evidence—so much evidence the police cannot possibly doubt me or ignore me. So much evidence that they can never make me look as they’ve made Lottie look.

I pull open my father’s beautiful cupboard. I shove your book and its wrappings toward the back, near your other things. I am careful to bury it all behind piles of stashed fabric. I slam the doors shut so hard I make myself jump. I wash my hands, not wanting a crumb of your DNA on my skin, transferred by touching what you have touched.

I swallow two tablets and climb into bed.
Transformations
is in my hands, but I only read a few pages before the knockout drops carry me away.

When I wake the next morning, the book is open on my chest. The words have seeped beneath my skin and into my blood. I cannot stop thinking of Sexton’s “Briar Rose.” Nothing can heal her from the things that were done while she was trapped in the dark. She is haunted into a terror of closing her eyes even after the prince’s kiss rescues her from the nightmare of that hundred-year sleeping spell.