The Catalyst (22 page)

‘Jasper, you don’t understand … I killed Jimmy ... and ... a woman ... a woman in my kitchen. I don’t even know who she was ... I had a knife and it cut her ... there was blood everywhere ... everywhere!’

He knew by the horror on her face that she was seeing the scene again.

‘God ... what have I done! I killed them ... how could I do that? It was wrong ... all wrong … everything went wrong! Is that why I can’t see, Jasper? Am I blind because I did something wicked?’ Putting her hand out in front of her she felt for him, plucking at his sleeve.

‘Please, Jasper ... tell me what to do! You’ve got to tell me how to make it right!

Chapter 20

Jimmy opened his eyes. At least, he opened one eye. His right eye appeared to be heavily bandaged but he raised a hand anyway to confirm what he already knew. Right, so he really was looking through just the one eye then. His head ached and he felt deathly tired but not too tired to wonder what had happened to his eye, or head, or whatever the hell the reason was for all this bandaging.

His neck felt stiff and awkward when he tried to move his head to look around but from the little he could see he managed to work out he was on his own in a small hospital room. And judging by the looks of all the serious looking bits of kit about, he reckoned it could just be for people in a very bad way. He puzzled about that, just for a moment, but then all the memories came back with a rush, falling over each other in his mind.

‘Sunny!’ he yelled.

No one responded and he tried to look round for some way of summoning attention. A nurse appeared as he was about to fall out of bed trying to grasp a promising-looking red button that was tantalisingly just out of reach.

‘Now then, Mr. Fisher ... where d’you think you’re going? Let’s have you back in bed and take a look at you...’ she said with the gentle ruthlessness of her training as she eased him back into bed and checked his bandaging.

‘Sunny ... where is she? She’s not … she’s okay ... right?’ His single eye pleaded to be given favourable information. He could not see her in the room and he wondered if all his panic-stricken fumbling with the tourniquet had been in vain. The memory of his struggle not pass out with pain after Jenny had jabbed at his face with that huge knife was still at the forefront of his brain and he wondered if the paramedics had responded quickly enough to his phone call.

‘Yes, she’s fine. You did a grand job ... the response team said she would definitely have died but for your quick thinking. As it is she left in reasonable shape.’

The nurse smiled down at him reassuringly as she checked the monitors next to him.

‘What do you mean ‘left in reasonable shape’? Surely she hasn’t been discharged already?’ He was confused despite his relief.

‘Yes, she left earlier this afternoon.’

‘Well, how long have I been unconscious? She can’t have been well enough to look after herself? She lost such a lot of blood! You can’t have let her go home!’

Despite his weakness he felt outraged at such an obvious lack of care but the nurse was made of stern stuff and refused to be browbeaten by him.

‘You have been unconscious for a few days, Mr. Fisher. The doctors kept you sedated after the operation. You are very lucky to be...’

The nurse stopped herself abruptly, feeling she had probably said too much.

‘We released Ms Smith safely into the care of her friend ... and her GP was also alerted. He’ll monitor her closely until she recovers fully.’

But Jimmy had only heard ‘into the care of her friend’.

‘What ... friend?’ he said, already knowing, and fearing, the answer.

‘Mr. Hervey … they were both most insistent and the duty doctor took the decision to let her go as Mr Hervey would be taking care of her. She really only needs to rest now, as long as there is no problem with her wound, and the doctor felt she would probably recuperate much quicker in familiar surroundings.’

‘Oh...’ he wanted to say ‘fuck’ but thought better of it in front of the nurse who was looking over the tops of her glasses and smiling at him like a benign vicar,‘ ... damn!’ he finished, warily watching her. ‘Okay … so when wil
lI
be able to go home?’

He badly needed to see Sunny. He needed to make things right and knew he would have to plead his case with her now. Her leaving so suddenly with Edward Hervey had sent a clear signal to him and he knew he could lose her, might indeed have already lost her.

Damn Jenny, damn her to hell, the mad, obsessive bitch. He could feel the heat rising in his head and something started to throb painfully.

‘Well, Doctor will be doing his rounds at about five o’clock this afternoon and you’ll be able to ask him then.’

Something in her manner as she replied to him, a certain subtle evasiveness, alerted him to a possible block to his being allowed home and, despite his unwillingness to hear any more bad news just at the moment, he knew he had to ask.

‘What happened to my eye?’

‘The doctor will tell you everything when he sees you.’ The nurse’s answer was the usual brisk brush-off given by medical staff and Jimmy instinctively knew that whatever the doctor was going to say it was definitely bad news.

It mattered little to him at the moment, he was more concerned with Sunny’s obvious hurry to leave him behind without a word. He felt abandoned and, in his weakness and disappointment, he had no option but to lie there and curse Jenny. It was easier than admitting to himself that all that had happened could have been his own fault.

Although Sunny had been released from hospital into Edward’s care, she saw it as only being for a day or two, just until she was strong enough to be able to look after herself at home. It was just the lifeline she had been looking for and she had agreed to it almost before Edward had finished offering. He had just been relieved she had not rejected his idea out of hand.

Now, after wrapping her up in a voluminous, fluffy blanket and propping her up with pillows on his sofa, he had rushed off to the village shop for extra bread and milk.

If Sunny was a little embarrassed by her need for Edward she managed to hide it well, simply grateful now she had some distance between herself and Jimmy, distance that would give her breathing space and time to think. Perhaps too much time, she thought as her mind repeatedly returned to him and the guilt set in.

Despite being injured himself she knew he had saved her life, she would have bled to death with a severed artery if it hadn’t been for his quick thinking. She wondered now how badly he was hurt and felt uncomfortable with her decision to leave hospital without talking to him. She had checked on his progress with the nurse before leaving but she knew it was not enough.

Then she remembered he had brought all this horror down on both of them. Even so it felt wrong to use Jimmy as a scapegoat, he was not the only one at fault here. She too was guilty, guilty of being too gullible, too easily persuaded. She thought back to how badly she had wanted to be persuaded by Jimmy.

The vision of the woman who had attacked them rose in her mind and she could still feel the vengeful desperation that had emanated from her. She must have been distraught, deranged even, to wield a knife, to want to kill ... and she had wanted to kill, Sunny had known that as she stood in front of her. The memory of it had the power to turn her insides to water.

Closing her eyes, she put her head back on the pillow and wondered what Jimmy was doing now? Was he awake, aware she had left him behind? Suddenly the shame welled up in her again and she wondered at herself, leaving him without any explanation, running away as usual when things went wrong.

It had been cowardly of her to leave him alone in hospital and the shame deepened as she remembered the total abandon with which she had made love to him, a man who seemed almost like a stranger to her now in the new light of remorse. The memory of their lovemaking no longer had the power to raise the slightest echo of their passion, in this moment there was only dishonour. It had taken a mad woman’s knife to cut away her feelings for Jimmy but it had been a most effective weapon.

Another new and unpleasant thought occurred to her. How soon would the locals find out she had been the injured woman? Those of them who watched the local news programme would certainly have recognised the farm, she was certain of that, and they would be sure the injured man was Jimmy. Indeed they had probably been expecting something of this nature to happen to him for years but who in the village might know she was the woman in the story, the other woman in fact?

Even if the television programme had not named her the local newspaper reporter would find a way of ferreting it out soon enough, though that would be nothing to what the villagers would do. They would speculate on all the unknown details and the lurid guesses put in place of facts would soon be passed off as gospel truth, although she wondered now if it was possible for the guesses to be more lurid than the truth.

Her mind’s eye showed her their faces, righteous and shocked, as they mulled it over in pub and chapel. Would Tom Batten still tug the peak of his cap at her as he passed in the street? Would Matty Tregoning still smile at her? She was sure they would be relieved she was alive, after all no one likes to believe there is some sort of knife wielding maniac in their midst, but she did wonder if such a crime of passion was almost excusable to them.

Now there appeared to be no danger to anyone else there would be a dissecting of the scandal she had caused. Scandal was what they expected from Jimmy Fisher and she was almost sure they would feel Jimmy had got what he deserved. The men especially would probably have seen it as some sort of poetic justice for having had more women than they had, although they would probably have thought castration would have been a more appropriate retribution.

She, however, would come off less well with them. What would the villagers think about her, the ones who simply observed her, the ones who had always thought of her as an outsider? They would regard her as the scarlet woman in this affair and she did not doubt they would make her life a misery of prurient, maybe even hostile, stares? Their sympathy could well be with the woman who had wielded the knife, the would-be murderer; the woman wronged who was nevertheless, one of their own.

The bleakness of her old life, from which Jimmy Fisher had so capably lifted her for that bright, brief period, descended again and she was at the polar opposite of the emotions she had felt a few days ago. She rubbed away the tears that welled up and crushed the self-pity she knew she had no right to feel. She had wronged an innocent woman and she had been a coward to leave Jimmy in his damaged state. She had been both weak and deceitful by default and she could never undo her mistakes.

Now she just felt deathly tired but she knew she needed to face facts, forcing herself to make plans. Once she had made certain Jimmy was going to be all right she would never see him again. She would move on, find another sanctuary and this time she would guard against any foolish neediness. Despite her attempts to bring her mind to bear on a future without Jimmy in it, she found herself returning over and over again to her feelings of shame, unable to rein them in.

The knowledge of her foolishness ate into her heart like acid, burning holes in her soul and corroding her ever-fragile sense of self-worth. Her face burned at the remembrance of her susceptibility, her wantonness, her willingness to fall for such a man as Jimmy Fisher. How could that have been love? It had merely been the most basic sexual attraction, something cheap and shallow and she had allowed herself to be fooled by her own body.

When Edward returned from the shop he found her weeping uncontrollably and totally beyond being able to articulate any reason for her distress. So, awkwardly, he held her, waiting for her to become calm and telling himself it was just reaction to the trauma she had endured.

But when her subsequent calmness turned to a silent, listless staring out of the window, he found it far more unnerving and began to wonder what he had so lightly taken on. It was fortunate his sensitivity did not extend to mind reading as Sunny bleakly contemplated her future.

A mermaid was an unusual catch for Matty Tregoning on an opportunistic morning fishing session between autumn storms. He had just rounded Carn Ruth rocks when he saw the woman entering the water. From such a distance he knew only that she seemed familiar as he watched her sink beneath the surface and automatically held his breath for her, expecting to see her start swimming.

It took only a few seconds to realise she was not going to swim and that in fact, she was going to drown. Suddenly his lazy day of speculative fishing was forgotten as he gunned the Maid of Zennor along from where he had seen the woman sink to where he knew the current would take her.

He was just able to reach down and grab hold of her clothing before she sank too deeply for him to reach her from the boat. Hauling her up to the surface he manhandled her over the side of his boat and dumped her unceremoniously onto the deck. He was aware that even in her wet clothing she seemed to weigh hardly anything.

‘No, you don’t, my maid. You don’t go doing things like that on my watch. I’m lifeboat crew y’know, and we don’t allow such going’s on.’

He turned her over and pushed the tangled hair away from her face to start CPR.

‘Bloody hell! Sunny! Sunny! What the hell did you think you were doing?’ Anxiety made him scold his catch severely and he hurriedly bent down to breath life into her just as she took a shuddering breath and choked up a cascade of water. Swiftly, he picked her up and held her close against himself to warm her.

‘Matty? Is that you?’ She peered up at him through waterlogged eyes, eyes the colour of the sea.

‘Yes, it’s Matty ... you’re safe now, m’dear … let’s just get you shoreside, eh?’ he said gruffly, hardly able to contain his relief as his heart raced at the thought of how close she had come to death.

Quickly he hauled off his jumper and dropped it over her head before tucking it tightly around her and making for harbour as fast as the Maid of Zennor could go. For Sunny, who he still clutched tightly, the sound of his heartbeat and the rumble of his voice made her feel safe and she lay gratefully against him.