Murderers I Have Known
(extracts)

‘Lullaby for an Insomniac Princess’

[ ...] So efforts redoubled to find a charm or a trick or a drug to bring sweet sleep to Imogen.
She collaborated with her teachers and helpers; her distraught parents spared no expense on the search. She communicated on the web with fellow sufferers from insomnia, she ordered rare copies of magical and medical treatises from antiquarian catalogues around the world, often competing with national libraries specialising in such materials. The Pierpont Morgan in New York, the Wellcome Institute in London, found themselves outbid. Many suggested methods failed, and some were too extreme to try: she did not want to hang by hooks through her nipples under the hypnosis of a holy man. Her hopes rose when her quest uncovered the existence of a rare mastic, recommended in a Yiddish midrash on Paracelsus, and still in use in the Amazonian rainforest by a tribe that had only been discovered last year. But in vain. When the piece of chewing gum arrived, in a chemically sealed plastic sachet, and she put it eagerly in her mouth and began systematically working it round her teeth and tongue, she felt the usual dreaded response begin to tingle up her spine and the nape of her neck and fizz upwards to the crown of her head and the stalks of her eyes: wakefulness! This quarter ounce of aromatic ooze from an endangered tree had cost, if you threw in the price of the air freight, more than a diamond the same size; and it had effected Imogen like strong peppermint, straight up her hose to rekindle that spot in her brain that never let her sleep: her completely dysfunctional hypothalamus, her squinting pineal eye, her burst Cartesian soul-seat, the perverse fountainhead of her entirely ill-assorted, awry, unnatural Circadian rhythms.One day, a fowler called at the palace and asked to see the insomniac princess: he had a story to tell her that might help her problem: she had him let into her study. He was red-haired and freckled, and wore over his jeans and sneakers a tatter coat of browns and greens and blacks. ‘Camouflage in the woods,’ he said. He set down a cage. He had made it, he told her, from a wine carton and some wire mesh. Though he bore a faint resemblance to Papageno, his cage was empty. But he did use it to trap songbirds, he said.
Imogen was shocked. She almost seized the clumsy object then and there and would have had him clap’t in irons if she’d been a princess in that kind of story. But he shushed her with a finger to his lips, and set the cage down on the floor behind him, out of reach.
He said to her, ‘It’s a poor thing, made in the image of the bird it could house: a poor, brown, dull bird that flutters from branch to branch in twilight, singing out in profound, unspeakable sorrow.’[ ...]

‘Natural Limits’

[ ...] The sound of feet shuffled down the gallery towards their door, followed by a tap and Gervase's voice calling: ' Liebe Bettina!' Bettina's eyes danced over her hand as she smothered a laugh.
'Gervase! At this time of night!'
Candace tried to straighten herself; to run a brush through her hair, brighten her lips and cheeks.
'Come, I have something to show you!'
'We're coming,' Bettina sang out. 'Just a minute.'
He took them along the gallery, now lit only by the glow above the doors of their bedroom and from the frosted glass windows of the manager's former office cubicle, his closed apartment's antechamber.
'Your eyes will soon become accustomed to the darkness, and you will see better.'
Gervase reached for Bettina's hand; she gave Candace her other and the three of them seemed to tiptoe through the darkness of the Museum's central nave towards the end. There, in a new glass box, was the shape of a head apparently made of gold, for its edges flared though the rest of it was black. As they got closer, they still couldn't pick out any features, and when they were standing, almost with their noses to the glass, there was nothing in the case except an oval glow suspended over a small cushion made of plum velvet.
'Bettina, and you, too, Bettina's dear friend, you are the first to see the greatest treasure the Museum of Likeness and Presence has been fortunate to acquire. Just keep your eyes steady, as if looking through the case, past it, not trying to pick out anything in it, and you will begin to see something.'
In the dark, Gervase's low, stilted speech made Candace half-giggly, half-jittery; she began to feel cross-eyed as she tried to adjust her focus in the way he described. Bettina still had her hand in Candace's; Candace was glad of her touch; her string was now held firm, she felt earthed.
Then she saw it: it materialised in front of her eyes just a fraction before the same gasp of pleasure escaped from Bettina's lips.
'You cannot photograph it,' said Gervase. 'It's an image which has no reflection. Because it's not made of light, but only of deeper degrees of shadow. So the only place you can see it is here, and in this darkness.'
It was a kind of a face; it was a pair of eyes and a pair of lips; above all, a smile; a smile dreaming to itself in space.
'Acheiropoieton: made with no hands,' said Gervase. ' A relic so rare I do not think it can be found anywhere else but here. It is the true likeness of a soul in paradise, caught permanently as an impression in the air, in the same way as you see matter dance in the rays of the sun. '

'Did you notice something familiar about her?' Bettina whispered to Candace when they were back at last in their funny gimcrack beds with their dipping supports.
'The seraphic smile?'
'Yes.'
'It's his most beautiful piece so far. So ethereal. Visible and invisible. There and not there. Like and not like. Present and not present.'
'If there were eleven thousand of them,' Candace said thickly, through waves of tiredness. 'There's no reason not to have turned up another, I suppose.'
'Eh già, vero.'
'Goo...night, Bettina.'
'Sleep well, darling Candace.'
'You too.'
'You're glad you came?'
'Ye...'
They were both drifting now, coasting through another kind of dark[ ...]

‘Daughters of the Game’

[ ...] The director came over and pushed her head back so that it was hooked over backwards against Jed Lester's shoulder, and then moved his right arm higher, so that he looked as if he was holding her in an arm lock. Then he moved the actor's left arm down to her groin.
'Flex your hand. Yes, like that. Good, perfect in fact. That's the basic position. Now, let’s shoot.'
Jed Lester's face would stay in view; the scene demanded his grimace of pleasure. She - his Cressida in the director's remake of Shakespeare's Troilus - was his whore, and the director wanted the brutality unbuttoned.
' You, Jed, think of something you really like. I want an expression of pure bliss on your face, animal ecstasy. You're appetite, the kind that cries hungry from the pit of the stomach and wants what it wants with no other thought. You're lust, greed, tyranny let loose upon the world, the enemy of innocence, the end of hope. This is the deed of darkness.’ He laughed. ‘Just give this scene all you've got.
‘Now, you -' He hesitated.
'Fernanda,' said the stand-in, relaxing out of the pose, and throwing him a tentatively friendly smile, since she was working for him for the first time, and liked his films, admired the elaborate excesses of his aesthetic, his grotesque and unlovely visions of the damned.
'We both begin with F - '
A stand-in had no face, she had a thousand faces. Fernanda had gone to drama school, and registered with an agency as a model. She acknowledged she would never be used as a cover girl, she didn't have those kind of looks. But she had a figure, and she liked it being seen. Soon, casting directors came to know her work: her legs and her arms were in demand. Standing in for Faye Lavery had followed: Faye had a baby and a habit and the one had darkened her nipples and the other had puffed the skin on her body, on her thighs and upper arms especially[ ...]

‘No One Goes Hungry’

[ ...] Finally, I made friends with Lucie, Mr Grindop’s daughter. I met her in the corridor of the hotel. I found her there two days later, scavenging for food from the leftovers on room service trays outside the bedroom doors when, sleepless and claustrophobic with hotel living, I decided to go for an early morning swim, hoping that the College athletes wouldn’t be there ahead of me.
‘He wants to eat,’ she said, helplessly, looking up and twisting a strand of her hair, pleading with me not to censure to pass on without comment.
But I stopped, and I asked her, ‘Why?’
She shuddered and clutched the dented aluminium lid from the dish against her chest, and told me this story – it came out in little jagged pieces, like broken china. (She interpolated like every three words on average, but I will omit most of them.):
‘It happened like this, the hunger. He has a business partner and they had a big project and were always together in front of the monitor, hardly talking sometimes exploding with … laughter, like, when things were going on, things were good. It was a data base, like they were selling it to people it involved putting together all kinds of sources like taking stuff from here and there some of it should be free anyways, Dad says, for people to take – he’s setting it free.’
I took the lid from her gently and steered her by the elbow to the couch opposite the elevators.
‘But...’ She jerked her head down the corridor, towards his room – their room?
‘Come,’ I said again. ‘It does good to talk, get it off your chest, my grandma used to say, and it works.’
I did want to help her. It was lonely in College Park Town and she touched me.
Her father’s operations, it became clear, involved accessing services past security.
‘I shouldn’t be telling, like, a stranger,’ she said vaguely.
We were down in the bar by then, she had stopped twisting her hair and her fingers and was folding up the sleeve of her drinking straw into tinier and tinier pleats as she sipped her cherry coke lite through melting ice.
‘If it makes you feel better…’
‘At first he could log on and do stuff on the web and it’d take his mind off the starving feeling, but then it got worse and he went to the doctor for pills to stop it, but they didn’t work.’ She was frowning, trying to squeeze down on the tears that were starting in her eyes. She still had a child’s eyes, dark and reflective and shadowed by weariness.
‘It was a virus,’ she said. ‘But this one jumped from the computer into people. Intra-species.’ She worked her face round the remembered term. ‘You activate it by doing something you shouldn’t.’
Again she bit her lip then took another sip through the straw.
‘I shouldn’t be telling you all this.’ She gave me a little smile - there was a coquettish streak in her, one that my own daughter no longer reserved for me but for boys, boys she met outside the house and wouldn’t bring in.
‘ Dad sold the package for lots of money after that. He was happy he was mellow – but his hungriness got worse.’
She stood up.
‘I must go now, he’ll need me, he’ll need… food.’ She put her hands over her ears and shook herself all over. ‘I have to find another way of helping him.’
‘Yes,’ I said. To myself I was thinking, This is no life for a young woman, no life for anyone. To Lucie I said aloud, absurdly, as I followed her back to the elevator, ‘Keep up your spirits, my dear, keep on truckin’, as they say in America.’[ ...]

Title Story

[ ...] Murder is moving in next door. I don’t mean street gangs or bomb factories in suburban kitchens; I mean the best addresses, official receptions, dinner parties. People seem to think that thrillers are escapist, that films about rape, massacres and mayhem merely offer fantasy pap. Of course some of the murderers I've met recently aren't really murderers, they're just acting the part, or being paid to make-believe. But the number of would-be real ones I'm encountering is on the increase, and they're not as furtive about it as they must have been in the past, when you didn't find yourself sitting next to one at dinner as if it were the most routine thing in the world. Murder's becoming naturalised, an import into the social landscape that feels as if it belongs there, like those garden escapes that begin by adding an exotic touch to a railway siding or a dilapidated parapet and end up looking plain weed-like: overgrown patches of Himalayan balsam, clumps of purple buddleia. Last month, I came across no less than two bona fide murderers. In one week.
Before that, over the whole of the last twenty years, I'd only known two others all told - in real life, I mean - and doubling the score like that all of a sudden in one week has made me wonder. I know one shouldn't put faith in signs or portents, and I'm sceptical on the whole about numerology and astrology and most of the other New Age pseudo-sciences. But we are living in the degenerate moment of the century, and ancient wisdom shouldn't really be judged on its present showing. The artists that mean the most to me, the ones I've studied and continued to study, were all deeply involved in the relation between the natural and the supernatural, they discovered patterns and systems everywhere and reproduced them in their work, in the geometry of their compositions, in the plan of their buildings. Chance itself belongs to the grand design. So I thought I should be on the alert. In case.
I'm going to take my murderers one by one, working backwards.
I was invited to a charity gala at the embassy where my ex-stepmother Natalia works [ ...]

‘The Belled Girl Sends a Tape to an Impresario’

[ ...] Miss Morris had small feet and the elastic of her ballet slippers made her instep into two plump mounds like the halves of a peach - she wore thick pinky-brown tights too. When she was young she’d been a character dancer; she once played a mad nun who tore her clothes off at the Royal Opera House. Her brother - you probably know him - is the actor who plays Kevin in Streetwise at 5.15 on Thursdays with a repeat on Monday I always miss because it's my time in the hot baths here. Miss Morris smelled of fags and talcum powder all mixed up. One day she came home to see Mum and Dad and told them I had a future and should go to a proper dance academy. So that's how I came to go to London when I was still titchy.
My hands were my 'passport to success', more than my legs, Miss Morris said. She advised me to build on my strengths. 'They're your capital, darling,' she'd say. This was when things got weird. You see whatever people were saying about them I couldn't believe. Friends in class would hold theirs up next to mine and the nice ones would groan and cry 'It's not fair!' and the not-so-nice ones would look squintily and tighten their lips and I could feel their hate slam down on my hands like a hammer. I won't repeat what they said - you'd think I was boasting. My boyfriend then was Lucas Tring, one of the Tring family, you know them, too, that meant something to me, music hall, circus, dance, show biz, for generations, and he wouldn't let me do anything, kept looking up insurance brochures to see what was the best deal he could buy to 'cover any loss'. He stopped me even washing my tights in the basin saying he'd do all that for me so that my hands wouldn't spoil. He and I were renting together off the Earls Court Road and that's when things began to go really weird. No, I suppose they had been for a while, except that I hadn't noticed. He was an artist, he kept on saying, and I was his muse. He was planning a show, he wanted to be someone like you, Mr Orlowski - I hope you're still there - he was designing the lights and the choreography, it was a puppet version of The Little Mermaid, with my hands in whiteface dancing the parts in a black box like a Punch and Judy booth. But I kept not doing the movements right. I kept falling over myself. I was all fingers and thumbs! And he was shouting at me. Then he'd grab my hands and massage them with oils and breathe on them...and he wouldn't let me use them even to... you know when we were in bed. He'd wrap them in silken bags with ribbons at the wrists.
I knew my hands were deteriorating every day, minute by minute, that if Miss Morris saw them now she'd notice they were getting wrinkled like an autumn leaf and the pores showing like someone has pricked out a paper pattern in the skin. The joints thickening and the tips flattening and the colour changing under the makeup, so that liver spots were just round the corner. I was beginning to find it hard to show them at all. I began pretending I had cramps so that I could get out of appearing, not have to perform any more. I stopped functioning, really. Then one morning I woke up and I couldn't move. I could not lift a finger, literally.
I was lying in bed, though it felt as if I was lying kind of above the bed, suspended like the girl who gets sawn in half at the circus, and a doctor came to see me and he gave me the idea for the cure. He said I should have a transplant, it would be simple. Plenty of people would be glad of a pair of hands like mine, they'd be very useful to someone, even if they didn't do me any good any longer. He had a big black hat with a wide brim and silver buckles on old-fashioned shoes and black stockings and he spoke in a soft voice - he was an American, like you! I helped him draw a circle round me with white chalk in my space above the bed and then I closed my eyes. There was no blood. He put my hands in a shoe box, wrapped in the neckerchief he had been wearing, and they did look beautiful, the knuckles dimpled just so, the backs smooth as ivory and each finger gracefully angled in relation to its neighbour. I was proud to be giving them away to someone who would know how to use them [ ...]

‘Stone Girl’

[ ...] Husbandry was a funny word for the work of making a home, she thought. Living here on the moor, it kept coming to mind; it implied vigilance and repair, walking the rows to inspect each plant, tying back a new shoot here, lodging a loose stone back in the wall there, tracking the relation of land and inhabitant, in order to take up occupation of the space in your turn.
What was the phrase, fits like an old shoe? And that footprint in the dust on the moon, corrugated, splay: the unmistakeable – and indelible - sign of human presence.
Tessa was inhabiting the already inhabited, fitting herself to the existing shape of things, finding the old paths to follow. The shapes were already there when she moved in with Hugh. She’d taken a step, across his threshold, to tread in the hollows of his footprints. Her new boots, those stout lace-ups for the moor, were now standing in the passage beside Hugh’s; after going out for a walk, they’d fall sideways together, unlaced, an old hedge laid down after the summer, branches intertwined. Tessa could hear his footfalls below her room as he left his study for the kitchen to make some tea.
She thought then, I am the stone girl missing from the ring, the one who wasn’t in the count when I tried to number the stones [ ...]

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

< publications

< murderers I have known page