Grasshopper Page 43

  I went to our bedroom window, opened it, for the room was stuffy, and leant out. The night air was fresh and cool but not cold. A little breeze made the plane leaves rustle and their thread-like branches sway. Down in the street, up against the kerb on our side, an unmarked white van was parked. As far as I could tell no one was inside it. Was it Jonny’s? How would one know? The registration number was obscured by darkness but it would have been useless if I had seen it. I had never noticed the number of Jonny’s van.

  Silver stirred when I went back to bed, turned over and put both arms round me. The arm that was underneath me dug into my breasts and the arm on top seemed set to crush my ribs, but I felt that this was part of his complete return to me and I soon fell asleep – to be awakened after what seemed a moment only, a second or two, by a scream loud enough and terrible enough to be heard on Maida Hill. I jumped out of bed. Silver’s arm was numb from my lying on it. He staggered up, rubbing the cramped muscles. The screaming went on, then died to a dreadful low keening. It wasn’t Liv’s voice but a man’s.

  Someone was in the living room. The lights were still off. Still shaking his benumbed arm, Silver was heading for the switch when someone pushed past him. The front door came open and whoever it was crashed down the stairs. Silver put the light on. I gasped. There was blood on the carpet, not spilt blood but stains and smears as if someone had wiped it off his shoes. Liv’s bedroom door was shut. From behind it came whimpers and sobs.

  Silver, his hand on the doorknob, said, ‘Don’t come in.’

  ‘I thought he’d killed her,’ I said. ‘But that’s her, isn’t it? Those noises?’

  This time I didn’t take his advice. I followed him into the room. I put the light on and saw blood all over the bed and the walls and the floor. Not Liv but Wim had been attacked. He had passed out but came back to consciousness as we approached the bed. I thought I wasn’t squeamish but when I saw his right leg I had to go out of there, ashamed of myself as I was, and vomit into the bathroom sink.

  It took a tremendous effort of will to go back. Wim lay still, moaning, half on his side, half on his front, blood pumping from the back of his leg. He had been struck with something sharp and heavy some six inches above the heel where the Achilles tendon passes.

  ‘It was Jonny,’ Liv sobbed. ‘we were sleeping. He came in and pulled off the sheet and the blanket and hit Wim’s leg with a – a –’

  ‘An axe by the look of it,’ said Silver.

  30

  I dialled 999, my hand shaking. When the woman’s voice answered and asked me which service I wanted, I said an ambulance. Perhaps I should have said the police. Silver, sitting on that bloodied bed, was trying to staunch the flow. He had made a tourniquet with a pair of tights and at last it seemed as if that awful pumping was restricted. Liv had collapsed. She lay spread out on her back, stark naked, her arms wide and her hands open, her whole body splashed with Wim’s blood. I did my best to control a fresh need to retch. Wim was speechless by now, silent, even the moaning had stopped. He lay open-mouthed, his neck stretched and his head back, the shaven crown almost touching his spine. He was pale as the sheet and looked as if he had died. In all my life I had only ever seen one dead person and that was Daniel lying at the foot of the pylon. I thought Wim was dead.

  The ambulance came in exactly five minutes. I went down to let the men in with their stretcher. They didn’t complain about having to climb four flights at three in the morning. One of them, the senior one I suppose, went up to Wim, asked him his name and how this had happened. He didn’t answer so we gave them his name and told them someone had burst into the room and attacked him.

  ‘Not a someone,’ Liv said, opening her eyes. ‘Jonny.’

  Silver went with Wim in the ambulance. They took him to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Alone with Liv, I got her into the living room, wrapped a blanket round her and made her hot sweet tea. I’d read somewhere that this is what you’re supposed to do. Then I stripped off all the bloodstained bedclothes and stuffed them into a rubbish bag. The idea of taking them to the launderette made me feel sick again. They could go out for the bin collection on Friday.

  I lit two cigarettes, one for me and one for Liv. I noticed that one of the windows I had shut was wide open. A pane was missing on the left, the side nearest to the catch. Barefoot, I nearly trod on the pieces of glass which must have fallen on to the carpet. He had come across the roofs, removed the pane with a glass cutter and lifted the window latch.

  Liv lay on the sofa, her mouth hanging open. I could see the gap where Jonny had knocked out her tooth. Wim’s blood had splashed her shoulders, her breasts, her neck. It was in her hair. She drank some of the tea and a trail of it dribbled down her chin. Suddenly I felt very cold, I was shivering. A draught was coming in through the hole in the window. I drew curtains that hadn’t been drawn for months, maybe years, and went to get sweaters for her and me.

  Liv said, speaking slowly in a gasping voice, ‘He got in – I am hearing nothing – till – till he is coming into the room – not then – no, he is quiet coming in, looking, looking, for something – all over the room – I am hearing a drawer open and then I am awaking – but I am dumb, Clodagh – I cannot – could not – speak.’

  ‘What was he looking for?’ I knew without asking.

  She didn’t answer. ‘Wim is sleeping. Then – Jonny – then he come to the bed – he has a thing in his hand – a – I don’t know –’

  ‘An axe.’

  ‘Yes, a axe. He is bringing it with him – I shout out – but too late – he is – is –’

  She began to sob. It wasn’t possible for her to go on. I said for her, ‘Wim was lying face-down. Jonny pulled off the covers and hit him on the back of his leg with the axe.’

  She stretched towards me, in almost a yearning way, as if she were pleading for something. ‘Yes, oh yes. And the blood – oh, the awful blood. It is done, I know why it is done. Like that – there!’

  I too knew why it was done there. It might have been better – almost – if Jonny had killed him. Later on, a psychiatrist who talked to Wim and encouraged him, in vain, to talk to her, said that Jonny’s act had been a symbolic castration. We knew better.

  It seemed likely to me that Liv would never want to go back into that room. But I never really understood her, I constantly underestimated her. When she had finished her tea and her second cigarette she got off the sofa and went into the bedroom. I followed. The bed was stripped, the sheets were gone, but blood had seeped through to the mattress, the walls were splashed with it. There was blood on the rugs and drops of it on the bedside cabinet and Wim’s chocolate bars and cigarette packet he’d left there. Liv pulled on a pair of jeans and pushed her feet into trainers. Blood was still all over her, under her clothes. She ran her fingers through her hair.

  For the first time I noticed that the room had been ransacked. The cupboard door was open, drawers had been pulled out and one lay overturned on the floor. Liv knelt down and rummaged through its spilt contents to find a pair of nail scissors. Her tears had stopped, colour had come back into her face. She looked up and gave me what in any other circumstances I’d have taken for a smile of triumph.

  ‘Now I will show you,’ she said.

  Like most of the curtains in the flat, those at Liv’s window were never drawn. A blind kept out the daylight. The curtains were made of some blue linen-like material and had a very deep hem, something like four inches deep, presumably made that way in case they shrank in the wash. Not that they’d ever been washed. Their dark colour was more due to dirt than the original dye. Liv took the scissors in her hand and began unpicking the hem on the left-hand side. Instead of allowing the notes to fall out, she picked them out one by one as the hem came undone. I watched her, fascinated. When she had built a small stack of notes on the windowsill she began on the other side. Her expression was concentrated but quite calm and, unbelievable though this was, cheerful. Both hems let down, she took the £50 notes in her hand an
d held them out to me, to see, to touch perhaps but not to hold. She kept a firm grip on them. Then she counted them. Curiously – or perhaps not curiously at all – she counted them in Swedish.

  ‘En, tva, tre, fyra, fem, sex, sju –’

  Of course there were forty notes. ‘What was in the packet you gave your dad?’

  ‘Pages of the newspapers I cut into pieces with these –’ she thought about it – ‘shears.’

  ‘Scissors. Why didn’t you tell him? He got hit over the head for a bunch of bits of newspaper.’

  ‘It was mine. It is my money. Why am I giving it to anyone?’

  We’d been through it all before. I shrugged. ‘But you let us all think…’ There was no point in finishing the sentence. It was then that it occurred to me Niall must have slept through it all or else he hadn’t come home the night before. I opened the door to his dining room very quietly. It was empty.

  ‘You could have the rest of the night in Niall’s bed,’ I said. ‘If you like.’

  ‘I am staying here. I have things to do.’

  What, I couldn’t imagine. I went back into our room and sat up in bed trying to read one of Silver’s books until he came back just before seven. He’d had a taxi from Paddington Green. He looked exhausted.

  ‘Wim lost so much blood,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten how much but he’s had to have a transfusion. They’re operating on his leg now.’

  ‘It was Jonny.’

  ‘I know. It had to be. I didn’t see him but I smelt him, that smell that’s part sweat and part scent – cologne, I suppose.’

  ‘Could you swear in a court it was Jonny?’

  He hesitated, shook his head, said, ‘Could you?’

  I was so afraid he meant to do nothing, tell no one, keep silent, not worry, that I could hardly speak. I just about managed, ‘The police?’

  ‘I’ve already told them.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘I went to them after I was sure Wim was being looked after. I told them what Jonny had done and about the mugging too. And I had to tell them I hadn’t seen him. Not for sure.’

  He took off his clothes and got into bed and I put my arms round him. He felt cold and stiff, less relaxed than I had ever known him.

  It was after eleven when I woke up. The other half of the bed was empty. I found Silver in the living room drinking tea with Niall who’d come home an hour before.

  ‘Liv’s gone,’ Silver said.

  What did he mean, gone?

  ‘See for yourself. Have a look in there.’

  The bloodstains were still there. Silver said he hadn’t touched them because the police might want to see them. The room had a bare look. Every ornament, the clock, the radio, the video recorder, all were gone. The blind had been raised and the curtains had a forlorn look, hanging there with ragged hems. Silver had left clothes of his in one of the drawers, swimming trunks, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, and these too had disappeared along with three large suitcases which had had their temporary home on top of the wardrobe. Truly, we had underrated Liv.

  I told Silver about the money. He, who the night before had looked as if he’d never smile again, managed a laugh when I told him about hiding the notes in the curtain hems. He said Liv had missed her vocation, she’d have made a great spy.

  ‘Maybe there’s still time,’ I said. ‘She’s never had a vocation yet.’

  We tried to imagine what had happened in the night. Presumably she had begun by packing all the stuff she had taken from the room into the suitcases along with her clothes. I wondered if she had left wearing nothing but my sweater and a pair of jeans. I wondered if she had washed off the blood. She couldn’t have called a taxi because the phone was in our room. We pictured her lugging those three heavy cases down four flights of stairs, staggering out of the front door and forcing herself to go into the street. Her agoraphobia had been real enough, her terror of seeing James and Claudia, but she had conquered both. She must have dragged those cases along the street, perhaps to the Edgware Road, perhaps only to Sutherland Avenue, and picked up a taxi there.

  And gone where?

  Not to Sweden. She would never have left for Kiruna without collecting her air fare, which was in Silver’s bank account. I remembered her mother’s friend in Elstree. Or had she simply gone to an hotel, perhaps the very one where her father had stayed?

  We never found out. Neither of us ever saw her again until I went to her house in Hampstead and she was Mrs Clarkson with two small children and the molar Jonny had knocked out hanging on a chain round her neck. Why? For what sentimental or agonizing reason? That was eleven years later. When we heard nothing from her, Silver sent her air-fare money back to Håkan Almquist.

  Now I wonder what she passed through in her transition from homelessness in a foreign country (though with £2,000) to marriage to a rich man, a beautiful house, a glamorous appearance. Who was the Lavinia she had implied she’d worked for, whose PA she had been? And what was this college she mentioned? How had she done it? Had she ever seen Jonny again or, come to that, Wim? I wondered too if she had ever seriously thought she might get money she had never lost out of an insurance company to which she had never paid a premium. Why had she worried and harried her parents about a sum of money she knew her father had never had? Solely for the better concealment of the money? I learnt the answers to none of these questions.

  The police came. They looked at the room and asked where Liv was. We had to tell them we didn’t know, that she had gone without warning. After they had left we did our best to wash the walls and get the blood off the mattress but unsuccessfully. Beryl, who never gave notice of her coming but popped in when the fancy took her, arrived in the early afternoon.

  We told her what had happened. We couldn’t think of a substitute story. She would of course pass it all on to the Clarks, the Asian couple and, possibly, to Max and Caroline Bodmer. Not much harm would be done as it would all be in the papers anyway.

  ‘He’s the one that’s in The King and I, isn’t he?’

  ‘He looks like the one that’s in The King and I.’

  ‘There’s too much of this sleeping with all and sundry,’ she said, unusually severe. ‘More trouble’s caused in this world by that than wars. Look at the Professor.’

  She scrubbed the walls and took the rugs away, saying that she’d wash them herself at home. But when she had sniffed the sheets in the bag, she agreed that putting them out with the rubbish was the only thing.

  ‘Been worse if it had been his neck,’ she said.

  Would it? We went to the hospital to see Wim that evening.

  He was barely conscious but perhaps this was only sleep, for he stirred after we had been sitting by his bed for a while, put out a hand and touched mine, feeling for it as if he were blind and then clutching it in a surprisingly strong grip. He wasn’t blind but he kept his eyes closed on that visit. Silver said afterwards it may have been because he feared to see what had been done to him, didn’t even want to see the outline of the cradle that kept the bedclothes from touching his leg. No one would tell us anything. We weren’t relatives. I wished I had said I was his sister but it was too late for that. A staff nurse wanted to know where his next of kin were. Had he a wife? Had he parents? We knew so little, though Wim’s having a wife seemed most unlikely.

  The events of the night before, that terrible night and what had happened to Wim – not to mention Liv’s disappearance – almost drove the inhabitants of 4E Torrington Gardens from our minds. They didn’t need us, they were well supplied with provisions, and all was in place for the Exodus. I believe we had entirely forgotten about the Nylands, that couple who lived in the middle of the house and who had turned out to be so much younger than we had expected. Our heads were full of Wim and Jonny and, to a lesser extent, Liv. We spent a long time when we got back from the hospital speculating as to what the relations between those three had really been. Liv had seemed passionately in love with Wim, but could she have loved him and not
even gone to see him when he lay ill and so fearfully injured? Had he come to love her? Or was there no more between them than an obsessive lust? Jonny’s act must have been motivated by jealousy. Because he loved Liv? Or had he only felt that he owned her, that she was his possession no one else might touch? And was he envious of Wim because, apart from Liv’s preference for him, he was tall and graceful and handsome and, in his own odd way, charming?

  Silver said he would never rest until he had found Jonny. For some reason, in the cause of being absolutely straightforward and above-board, I suppose, he felt that, having told the police what had happened, he was duty-bound to tell Jonny he had done so. It was quite late at night when we made our way to Holloway. I insisted on going with him. But Jonny wasn’t there and his van wasn’t parked outside. A woman who came out of one of the rooms and spoke to us as we were going down the stairs said he had told her two days before that he was leaving. We walked up the street, turned left and walked down the next street, looking in vain for the white van. It seemed that Jonny really had gone. I said I hoped that didn’t mean the police wouldn’t find him. Silver looked miserable.

  ‘You know how people always say finding a murderer won’t bring the dead person back? I feel a bit like that about Jonny. Finding him and sending him to jail won’t mend Wim’s leg and I don’t suppose it will stop him mugging someone next time or bashing him with an axe, do you?’