Peter Robinson - Friend of the Devil

“Don’t do anything foolish,” Annie said, returning to the stool. “We can work this out.”

“You do speak in clichés and platitudes, don’t you? Don’t you realize it’s too late for any of that now?”

“It’s never too late.”

“It was too late eighteen years ago,” said Dr. Wallace.

“So you’re Kirsten,” Annie whispered. Somehow, she had known it, at least in some part of her mind, since she had talked to Dr. Wallace in the Queen’s Arms the previous evening, but that knowledge didn’t do her a lot of good now.

“Yes. Elizabeth is my middle name. Wallace is from an ill-advised marriage that I should never have entered into. A marriage of convenience. An American student. At least I got the name from him, and he got his British citizenship from me. Needless to say, the marriage was never consummated. If you’d have dug deeper, you’d have uncovered it all. It’s a matter of public record. All you really had to do was check the registry of marriages. I didn’t even try very hard to hide it, really. When I went to medical school, I simply enrolled as Elizabeth Wallace. A new life. A new name. It caused one or two problems with my old records, but the university was patient, and we managed to get it all sorted out. I told them I was trying to avoid an abusive husband and would appreciate their discretion. But they would have told you in the end.”

“So you moved on, changed your name, became a doctor.”

“I didn’t know what would become of me. I had no plans. I’d done what I set out to do. A terrible thing, really. A murder. No matter that the victim didn’t deserve to live, was the worst kind of excuse for a human being you could imagine. And it wasn’t my first. I’d also killed an innocent man and harmed a silly boy.”

“I’ve talked to Keith McLaren,” Annie said. “He’s all right. He recovered. But why him?”

Dr. Wallace managed a tiny, tight smile. “I’m glad,” she said. “Why? The Australian recognized me in Staithes, even though I was in disguise. I had to think fast. He’d been with me in the Lucky Fisherman, where I saw Jack Grimley. If they ever questioned him…”

“I’ve been there,” said Annie. “The Lucky Fisherman. Why Grimley, too?”

“A mistake. Pure and simple. When I remembered what my attacker looked like, I found I had an even stronger memory of his voice, his accent, what he said. That was what led me to Whitby. Once I was there, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d find him. Nothing else mattered. Grimley sounded like the man who attacked me. I led him to the beach. That part was easy. Then I hit him on the head with a heavy glass paperweight. That was hard. I had to hit him again. He wouldn’t die. When he did, I dragged his body into a cave and left it for the sea to lick out. The tide was due in. Oh, I can justify it all to myself, of course. I was on a mission, and there were bound to be mistakes. Casualties. It’s the cost of war. But I got there in the end. I got the one I was after. The right one. And when it was over, everything felt different. Do you know Saint Mary’s Church, in Whitby?”

“The one on the hill, near the abbey?”

“Yes, with the graveyard where you can’t read the names. Inside it’s divided into box pews. Some of them are for visitors, and they’re marked ‘For Strangers Only.’ After I pushed Greg Eastcote over the cliff, I went there and got into one of those boxes, and I curled up in a ball. I was there… oh, I don’t know how long. I thought, If they come for me now and catch me, it’s okay, I’m not running, it’s fine, that’s how it’s meant to be. I’ll just wait here until they find me. But nobody came. And when I left that pew, I was a different person. I was calm. Totally calm. Can you believe that?” She shrugged. “I left what I had done behind me. I felt no guilt. No shame. So the name change seemed natural. I’d used different names all along, anyway. Martha Browne, Susan Bridehead. It was a sort of game as much as anything else. I was an English student. My name was Elizabeth Bennett for a while after that, but my husband’s name just happened to be Wallace.”

“But how did you find Greg Eastcote? How did you know who he was?”

“Like I told you, I remembered things. Partly it was the hypnosis.” She paused. “He said things, you know. All the time he was doing it to me, he talked, said things. I remembered. He named places, the work he did. And there was a smell I could never forget. Dead fish. I put it all together in the end. I did make mistakes, but I got there. I got him. The right one. I made him pay for what he did to all of us.”

“What did you do afterward?”

“First I went back to Leeds, to Sarah, then back to Bath, to my parents. I tried to pick up the threads, but I was different. I was no longer one of them. I’d cut myself off by what I’d done. So I went away. I traveled a lot, all over the world. In the end, I decided to put the past behind me and become a doctor. I wanted to help people, cure people. I know it sounds odd, after what I did, but it’s the truth. Can you believe that? But in my studies I was drawn to specialize in pathology. Funny, isn’t it? Working with the dead. I was always nervous around the living, but I never had any qualms about handling dead bodies. When I saw the wounds on the Paynes’ victims six years ago, I couldn’t help but revisit my own experiences. And then it just fell into my lap. Julia told me one night after dinner, when she’d had a few drinks. She had no idea, of course, who she was telling.”

“Look,” said Annie. “Please put the scalpel down. Let’s stop this before someone else gets hurt. People know I’m here. People will come.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“I can understand why you did it, all those years ago. Really, I can. I was raped once, and almost killed. I hated him. I wanted to kill him. I felt such rage. I suppose I still do. We’re not that different, you and I.”

“Oh, but we are. I actually did it. I didn’t feel rage. And I didn’t feel guilt.”

“Now I try to stop people from doing it, or bring them to justice if they do.”

“It’s not the same. Don’t you understand?”

“Why did you kill Lucy Payne? For God’s sake, she was in a wheelchair. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything. Why did you kill her? Wasn’t she suffering enough?”

Liz paused a moment and stared at Annie as if she were crazy. “You don’t get it, do you? It wasn’t about suffering. It was never about suffering. Certainly not about her suffering. I never cared whether she suffered or not.”

“So what was the point?”

“She could remember, couldn’t she?” Liz whispered.

“Remember?”

“Yes. That’s what they do. Surely you know that? That’s the whole point. They remember every moment, every cut, every thrust, every feeling they experienced, every ejaculation, every orgasm, every drop of blood they shed. And they relive it. Day after day after day. As long as she could remember it, she had all she wanted.” She tapped the side of her head. “Right there. How could I let her live with the memory of what she’d done? She could do it over and over again in her mind.”

“Why not just push her over the edge?”

“I wanted her to know what I was doing and why I was doing it. I talked to her the whole time, just the way Eastcote did to me, from the moment the blade touched her throat until… right up to the end. If I’d pushed her, something might have gone wrong. Then I wouldn’t have been able to get down there and do what I had to. She might not even have died.”

“But what about Kevin Templeton?”

“Another mistake. Another casualty. I was trying to stop a memory from being made, and I thought he was the one. He shouldn’t have been there. How could I have known he was there to protect people? I think perhaps he’d sensed my presence there, and maybe he thought I was the killer. When he started to walk toward the girl, he was going to warn her to leave, but I thought he was going to attack her. I’m sorry. You’ve got the real killer now. He’s the same as Eastcote and Lucy Payne. Perhaps at the moment he seems contrite, remorseful, but you wait. That’s because he’s just been caught and he’s scared. Even worse, he’s beginning to realize that he won’t be able to do it again, to experience that bliss again. But he’ll still have his memories of that one glorious time. He’ll be sitting there in the corner of his cell running over every detail. Relishing the first second he touched her, the moment he entered her and she gasped with pain and fear, the moment he spilled his seed. His only regret will be that he won’t get to do it again.”