Peter Robinson - The First Cut

She was at the center of the park now, and she could see haloed streetlights on the bordering roads. She felt a sudden impulse to sit on the lion. The grass swished under her feet as she walked over and touched the warm stone of the mane. Then she mounted it and felt silly but happy, like a little girl again. She thought of cockatoos, monkeys, insects and snakes, then she threw her head back to look for the moon again, and felt herself choking.

Laura’s voice cut through the panic, steady and calm, but Kirsten was still struggling for breath as she tried to drag herself out of the trance. She could feel the callused hands with their stubby fingers over her mouth, and she was being turned around, pulled off the lion’s back onto the warm grass. The world went dark and she couldn’t breathe. The cloud in her mind hardened and gleamed like jet, blotting everything out. She felt her back pushed hard against the grass, a great weight on her chest, then she burst up to the surface, gasping for air, and Laura reached forward to hold her hand.

“You’re all right,” Laura said. “It’s over. Take a deep breath…another…That’s right.”

Kirsten glanced around her, terrified, and found she was back in the familiar office with its glass-enclosed bookcases, filing cabinets, grinning skull and old hat stand.

“Will you open the blinds?” she asked, putting a hand to her throat and rubbing, “I feel like I’m at the bottom of the sea.” She was still gulping for breath.

Laura pulled the blinds up, and Kirsten walked over to look out hungrily on the twilit city. She could see the river below, a slate mirror, and the people walking home from work. It was just after five o’clock and the streetlights had come on all over the city. She stood there taking in the ordinariness of the scene and breathed deeply for a couple of minutes. Then she sat down opposite Laura again.

“I could do with a drink,” she said.

“Of course.” Laura fetched the Scotch from the cabinet, poured them each a shot and offered her cigarettes. “Are you all right now?”

“Better, yes. It was just so…so vivid. I felt as if I was really living through it all again. I didn’t expect it to be as real as that.”

“You’re a very imaginative woman, Kirsten. It’s bound to be that way for you. Did you learn anything?”

Kirsten shook her head. “No, it all went black when he turned me around and dragged me to the ground.”

“He did that?”

“Yes, of course he did.”

Laura tapped a column of ash into the tin ashtray. “That’s not what you said before.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember? Before, you could only remember up to the point of the hand coming from behind. You said nothing about being dragged down.”

Kirsten frowned. “But that’s what must have happened, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but this time you actually relived it.”

It was true. Kirsten had remembered the sensation of falling, or of being pushed, onto her back on the ground, and the soft warmth of the grass as it tickled the nape of her neck…then the darkness, the weight. “I didn’t see anything, though,” she said.

“Perhaps not. I told you this might take several sessions. The point is that you’ve made progress. You remembered something you didn’t remember before, something you’d buried. It might not be much, and it might not tell you anything, but at least it proves that you can do it, you can remember.”

“There’s something else, too,” Kirsten said, reaching for her Scotch. “It’s true that I didn’t see anything new this time, but you’re right, I did get further than I’ve been before. It’s not just images, visual memories, but there are feelings, too, that come back, aren’t there?”

“What kind of feelings do you mean? Fear? Pain?”

“Yes, but not just that. Intuitions, inklings…it’s hard to describe.”

“Try.”

“Well, what I felt was that I did see his face. I don’t mean now, today, but when it happened. I know I saw him, but I’m still blocking the memory. And there was something else as well. I don’t know what it was, but there was definitely something else about him. It was almost there, like a name on the tip of your tongue, but I resisted. I couldn’t breathe, and it was so dark I just had to come out.”

“Do you want to carry on?” Laura asked, offering the bottle again. “You don’t have to. Nobody can make you. You know how painful it can be.”

Kirsten tossed back the last of her Scotch and held her glass out. The experience had terrified her, true, but it had also given her something she hadn’t felt before: a resolve, a sense of purpose. Her cold hatred had crystallized into a desire to see her attacker. It was all connected, in some strange way, with the dark cloud that weighed down her mind.

When she finally spoke, her eyes were shining and her voice sounded strong and sure. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do want to carry on, whatever happens. I want to know who did this to me. I want to see his face.”

The newspapers had nothing much to report the next morning. Sue sat in her new café on Church Street, drinking coffee to get rid of the taste of Mrs. Cummings’s tea. She knew she would be better off not drinking the vile brew in the first place, but she needed something hot and bitter to wake her up. It was drizzling outside, and the café was full of miserable tourists keeping an eye on the weather, spinning out a pot of tea and a slice of gateau until the rain stopped and they could venture out again.

Sue hadn’t slept well. She had already been awake when the seagulls started at a quarter to four. Even under the blankets and the bedspread, she had been trembling with delayed shock at what she had done to Keith McLaren. She could still see his stunned, innocent face, the blood pouring over his tanned cheek. She told herself he was just like the rest, like all men, but she still couldn’t help hating herself for what she had been forced to do.

When she came to analyze her actions, it was mostly the way she had deliberately set up the situation that disgusted her. Because she didn’t see herself as a cold-blooded killer, she had lured Keith into the woods and forced him to put her in a position from which she could strike out in self-righteous anger. In a way, it had been as cold-blooded as any execution; she had just needed to get herself excited enough to kill, and to that end she had seduced Keith, seduced him to death. There was a perverse logic in that somewhere that made even Sue twist her lower lip in the semblance of a smile the next morning, but the night had been dreadful, full of self-loathing, recrimination, loss of nerve. Even the talisman and the litany of victims offered scant comfort in the small hours.

She had also worried. As it happens when you lie awake during those dreadful hours of the not quite morning with something on your mind, one fear leads directly to another. The disturbed mind seems to toss up terrors with the prolific abandon of a tempestuous ocean. By killing Keith, she had more than doubled her chances of getting caught before she finished what she had set out to do. With two murders to investigate, the police would surely spot the similarities and start stepping up their search. Somebody might have seen her with Keith in Staithes, Port Mulgrave or Hinderwell, and then someone else might remember seeing her with Grimley in the Lucky Fisherman. Her only hope was that Keith’s body would remain undiscovered in the woods until she had finished her task, and that was what she prayed for as she tossed and turned and finally slipped into an uneasy sleep, lulled by the cacophonous requiem of the gulls.

The coffee and cigarette helped her wake up. There was nothing in the nationals about the Student Slasher, but according to the local paper, the police were now certain that Jack Grimley had been murdered. Detective Inspector Cromer said that they were looking into his past for anyone who might have a grudge against him, and they still wanted to know if anyone had seen him after he left the Lucky Fisherman on the night of his death. Clearly no one had come forward so far. Sue remembered that night. She was sure nobody had noticed them, and once they had gone down to the beach and the cave, no one had even known they were there.