The Evil Seed (28 page)

I nodded. ‘Thank you,’ I
said.

‘I wonder,’ he
continued, ‘whether you could recall whether you were in the company of this
young lady the night before last, Mr Holmes?’

He saw my change of
expression. ‘A routine question, I assure you,’ he said.

I frowned, as if I were
trying to remember.

‘No, I was on my own
that night, and I really didn’t do very much,’ I said. ‘I went for a walk
around the town, as I usually do on a fine evening, then I worked on my thesis.’
I caught his glance. ‘I’m writing a book.’

‘Fiction?’

‘Oh, no.’ I shook my
head. ‘Another stuffy academic tome, I’m afraid. A study in Pre-Raphaelite
archetypes. It’s a bit of a hobby-horse of mine.’

Turner nodded as if he
understood.

‘And the Swan Inn? Have
you ever been there?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t
go out very much,’ I explained. ‘And when I do, I tend to go to restaurants or
the theatre, not to inns. I don’t have a good head for alcohol.’

I saw his quick glance
at the open whisky bottle on the bedstand, and cursed myself for being too talkative.
‘For a friend,’ I explained quickly.

The Inspector lingered
for another few minutes, endless minutes they seemed to me, then he left,
raising his hat to me with a polite: ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Holmes.’ And
as soon as he was safely behind that door again, I gave myself up to the
outpouring of my tension. I was certain that he knew; how, I could not tell,
for I was equally certain that he had no proof.

When I began to think
rationally again, I considered what dangers he might present to me. He was a
policeman, he was trained to detect guilt; but I was inclined to think that
the advantage was nevertheless on my side. The truth was so incredible that it
would take him longer than a lifetime to discover it; and now that I suspected
that he was watching me, I could prepare myself. But what if he had me
followed? I thought.

The immediacy of my mind’s
reply stunned me for a moment; unhesitatingly, it flung back, not a thought,
but an image of such stark intensity that it overwhelmed me momentarily. It was
the image of myself striking, leaping as an animal leaps, my knife held facing
upwards, a flicker of light in the shadows. I imagined myself striking, blood
spraying across my face precious as the fount of life; saw the man beneath me
fall, drowning, disbelieving. I felt the day’s meal clench inside me like a
fist, and I retched, dry, sharp bursts of nausea which turned into a recurrence
of my hacking cough.

Not yet,
my mind
whimpered, as I clutched my stomach, doubled up on my bed; but the knowledge,
untouched by remorse or nausea, stayed with me all the same.
Thought made
flesh,
I thought to myself, with a hysterical cackle of laughter; and
though a part of me still whimpered and wept, it was that thought, the
knowledge that if I had to I would kill him, yes, and feed on his corpse, that
followed me, relentlessly, into the unconsciousness of sleep, and the cryptic
convolutions of my labyrinthine dreams.

Two

ALICE COULD NO MORE HAVE PASSED A FAIR BY
THAN SHE could have ignored a packet of biscuits in her food cupboard. It was
not that she particularly liked fairs; rather, she liked the
idea
of
them, the memories of childhood that they recreated, better than the reality.

Popcorn stands, coconut
shies, candy-floss — pink sugar-sticky nests for wasps — tall men with loud
voices and cold travelling eyes, the roundabouts and the big wheels and the hot
dogs and the litter and the smells; wagons with gilt doorways and exotic secret
signs. Pushing and shoving, children jostling for pockets in the crowd …
doughnuts, spending all her pocket money on the shooting range only to win a
Single yellow balloon which burst on the way home, the high reek of animals in
tiny cages, flying high on the big wheel, walking through the fair late at
night with Joe. Joe winning a coconut on the stand, laughing. Joe eating pizza
from a greasy paper plate, watching the stars both electric and real. A
maelstrom of conflicting memories, like confetti, showered her from every side.
For a moment, she looked at the worn, faded sign, gilt and red: FAIR! BIGGEST
IN THE SOUTH! BIG RIDES!! Remembered, reached for her purse, and walked in.

Voices, music, voices,
noises; beginning-of-summer British at play. And in the background, the lovely
spires and turrets of the colleges, incongruous and timeless above the crowd.
Alice smiled, tucked her shopping bag under one arm and began to move towards a
toffee-apple stall, bought the biggest, stickiest-looking apple she could see,
and moved away, taking her little circle of tranquillity with her. Aimlessly,
happily, she wandered through the field, occasionally pausing to watch the roundabout
with its thin, wild-eyed horses rushing past, the people at the stalls. (A
father of three trying to win a teddy bear at the shooting-range: ‘Go on Dad!’;
a wide-eyed schoolboy staring enviously at the hoopla, twenty-pound notes taped
enticingly on to wooden blocks, the caption RING IT RICH; a tall, thin boy of
sixteen at the dartboard, grinning, lifting a giant pink rabbit into the arms
of a laughing girl.)

A man pushed past her,
one hand stuck in the pocket of his coat, the other holding a can of beer, he
was almost close enough to Alice for his swatch of dyed black hair to brush her
face. For an instant, he seemed fleetingly familiar, and she strained to see
his face, but he disappeared into the amusements arcade before she could know
for sure. She bit into her apple again; it was a good one, tart and pink
inside, the deep-red toffee still slightly warm from the steaming vat of sugar
on the stand, outer shell just beginning to go hard. She wondered why
toffee-apples always turned out to be so difficult to eat: too wide to bite
into, too sticky to get a firm hold on to. She had to take tiny, tiny bites,
delicately working at the outer shell with the tip of her tongue. A man with
tattoos on his face was selling rides on the roundabout; for a moment Alice was
tempted, but decided against it. Fairground rides are only fun when you’re not
alone, she thought (doggedly shaking the memory of another Alice, hand-in-hand
with another Joe, endlessly neck-to-neck in an interminable roundabout race
between two horses, dappled grey and pink with cornsilk manes, while the
roundabout played ‘Camptown Races’ and the world spun to a different tempo) ,
and moved on.

He was standing by the
main gate, unmistakable this time, stranger in the sunlight than he ever was at
night.

Even the crowds of
students seemed to skirt him, so that he stood alone in a little pocket of
isolation. Despite the warmth of the day, he was wearing his coat buttoned and
turned up at the collar, and beneath it, at his ankles, she caught the gleam of
sunlight on the chains of his motorcycle boots. Impossible to know whether he
had seen her; surrounded by people as she was, there was no cause to be
stricken with panic, but she was.

He seemed to be waiting.

She turned, mingling
with the crowd again. Suddenly, her eyes were everywhere, testing, measuring
the crowd with a new insight. ‘If Java is there, then maybe Rafe is, too,’ she
thought; and on the tail of that, ‘If Rafe is there
…
maybe the others
…
Elaine, Zach, Anton.’ Maybe other ones she had not yet seen.

Perhaps they were
watching her in the crowd. Perhaps they were waiting for her.

Once again she quickened
her pace. The smells of the fairground were much stronger now, dizzying; the
crowd parted to allow her to pass, and she felt singled out, too noticeable.
She began to jog towards the far end of the field, where the caravans and the
animals were, where she could slip out unseen, in safety. A face snapped up out
of the mill of people to look at her; a man with red hair tied back, black crosses
dangling from his ears. Alice met his eyes for a moment … saw the bird tattoo
on his face. He flashed an insolent, disturbing grin at her, blurred again into
the crowd. A woman brushed by her with a touch as light as snow; she started,
looked around, but the woman was gone. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed
a thin figure standing beside a hot-dog stand, flaxen hair shocking in the
bright sunlight
…
she wheeled round, convinced that this time, she
knew it … she saw a girl, eyes hidden under a spray-mask of black make-up, bleached
hair puffed out from her head. She ran in slow motion to the end of the field,
slipped in between two caravans, washing hanging from a guy-rope between them,
looked for the way out. A goat, tethered to a railing, interrupted its grazing
for a moment to fix her with a long, glassy stare. She skirted round a sleeping
dog, muzzle in its paws, and rounded the caravan.

‘Hello, Alice.’ It was
the girl from the hot-dog stand; for a moment, Alice felt no panic. Then, as
she took in the face, the features behind the make-up, the hair coarsely
sprayed white showing traces of red still at the roots, she froze. Stupidly,
she stood there, her eyes wide, her hands dangling absurdly, the only motion in
a world of stillness.

Ginny took a step
forwards.

Alice dodged in-between
the caravans, heedless now of the dog, which looked up and started a loud,
aggressive barking. She was a long way from the crowd of holidaymakers now,
isolated at the end of the field. Her feet were heavy on the baked ground; the
world juddered and jolted as she ran. There was a man coming towards her; red
hair and earrings, a bird tattooed on one cheekbone.

He smiled, the sunlight
snickering off his gold tooth. He pulled something from his pocket, something
which flicked the sunlight into Alice’s eyes in a long ribbon of polished
steel. With a gasp, she changed course abruptly and dashed off across the field
towards the people.

Behind her, Ginny made a
tiny sign to Zach and Rafe, and the three of them fanned out, walking
purposefully towards the other end of the field. Beneath the sprayed mask Ginny
was smiling, and in her hand she carried a fat post office envelope.

Two

JOE QUICKENED HIS STEP, EYES FLICKING LEFT,
RIGHT, left into the side-streets as he moved. His pace was elastic,
half-running, half-walking, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders slightly
hunched. He might have been an eccentric poet, on his way to some mysterious
rendezvous, some crazed bespectacled inventor racing towards a new discovery.

For an instant, he
stopped in mid-stride, thinking he saw her, then moved on. He saw her in a
dozen places after that … but when he turned, Ginny was never there. It was
past two now; she should have been home. She should have left a message, at
least. He slowed his pace fractionally, trying to analyse the sense of urgency
which had motivated him. He remembered Alice telling him how Ginny had gone out
that night, telling him how two men had come looking for her, two men who were
her friends. A vision of Ginny sitting in some JCR, some public lavatory, maybe
a bus shelter or a bandstand in the park … Ginny smiling
…
nodding …
Ginny shooting a long needle into her arm while the friends looked on,
smiling.

He began to run,
checking every little passageway, every shop window, every archway, railing or
gate. She should never have gone without telling him, he thought. The world was
full of bloodsuckers, profit-merchants eager to take advantage a of someone as
innocent as Ginny. How she had managed to get this far without going under he
didn’t know, especially after what she had told him the other night, strangely
childlike, strangely untouched, sitting in his armchair, hugging her knees. She
had told him everything. The drugs, the dirt, the men … with a little smile
and a wistfulness in her eyes. By all rights the bloodsuckers should have got
her.

Strange little girl …
but she had guts enough not to let the bastards grind her down. She had
gone right back to the edge and had come back all on her own, and that made her
stronger than he was, stronger and braver.

With increasing anxiety
Joe continued his search of the streets of Cambridge. Figures milled around
him. The primitive rhythm of the crowd intensified the throbbing of his
headache; the distant music of the fairground tunnelled into his brain.

Joe didn’t like fairs
much. There was something sinister about them, he thought, about the people who
came and went, carrying the promise of returned childhood under those faded
canvases, under that well-oiled and hidden machinery. Once, when he was a
child, his father had taken him to the fair; like all little boys, he had loved
it, had eaten candy-floss and baked potatoes, ridden on the roundabout, bought
a balloon from an old woman with a scarf round her head and the warmest, most
twinkling eyes he had ever seen
…
and right at the end, when his
father had suggested that maybe they might get going home now, he had insisted
on having one last ride on the roundabout.

‘OK, Joey.’ Joey’s dad
had always been the most tolerant of fathers; half a child himself, he had had
just as good a time as Joey himself that day, and he had sat Joey comfortably
down on the jewelled saddle of the big fairground horse and had turned away to
look at the arcade.

‘Hi-ho, Silver!’ Joey
had whispered. ‘I’m the Lone Ranger.’ Liking the sound of the phrase, he had
repeated it: ‘I’m the Lone Ranger!’ As if in agreement, the roundabout had
begun to move. Being six, Joey had momentarily felt the ripple of Silver’s
muscles beneath the hard pink hide; the horse had bucked, and the Lone Ranger
had fought bravely to keep on. ‘Hi-ho, Silver, awayyy!’ he had cried, and the
roundabout had sped up, the horses spinning and bucking, black horses and white
horses and exotic red and blue and yellow horses, their manes flying, their
glass eyes wild and frenzied. Joey had been ecstatic. He had felt as if all
eyes were turned towards him, the brave boy on the wild horse. He had gripped
the jingling reins with fierce joy, faces blurring around him with the speed of
the ride. Suddenly, a face had swum up towards him out of the half-gloom;
neon-lit and almost ghostly in the changed light, he had recognized the
balloon-woman, earrings glinting exotically in a million refracted undersea
colours.