Peter May - The Firemaker

‘So maybe it was my fault he started playing around. But I think maybe he’d always been doing it. I just never knew until it all came out at the trial.’ She stopped herself, wondering why she was telling him all this. It was coming so easy, pouring from her like blood from a wound, or maybe pus from an infected sore.

She glanced up and found his eyes fixed on her, deep and dark and sympathetic. Then for a moment she became aware of the girl who had served them shuffling idly between the tables, adjusting a chair she might have adjusted a dozen times before, wiping a speck of dust from a table, her mind lost in thoughts of a life they would never know.

‘I should have known from my student days,’ Margaret said. ‘There was always one lecturer, maybe younger than the rest though not always, that the girls would all find attractive. And for a semester, or maybe even a whole year, one of them would have a passionate affair with him. They had so much in common, she would tell the others. He was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced. By the end of the year she would grow up and move on, and he would have another passionate affair with some kid the next year, some starry-eyed young girl who would think he was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced.’ Margaret’s smile was bitter and sad. ‘Michael was one of those. Every year another student, or maybe two. And he would sit up with them into the small hours, smoking dope and drinking beer, putting the world to rights. While I was working ninety-five-hour weeks as an intern, busting a gut to build a career.’ Her eyes started to fill, and for a moment she panicked, thinking she might start to cry. She blinked furiously, and a couple of salty drops splashed on the lacquered surface of the table. She drained her tea, down to the thick green leaves that had sunk to the bottom of the cup. Without a word Li refilled her cup, and then she felt his hand slip over hers, warm and dry and comforting. She blinked at him and smiled bravely. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…’ She sighed. ‘I should never have started this.’

‘It is all right,’ he said softly. ‘Go on if you want to. Stop if you don’t.’

She withdrew her hand from his and took a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. ‘The first I knew anything about it,’ she said, ‘was when the police came to arrest him.’ She remembered vividly how it had been. ‘I was with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office by that time. I’d been working late. Michael was still up when I got home. He’d been smoking a lot of dope and was acting pretty strange. There’d been a murder on campus, in the student residence. One of his students, a nineteen-year-old girl, raped and battered to death. We’d been talking about it the day before. He seemed pretty shocked. I’d fallen asleep on the settee, and the next I knew the police were at the door. Six in the morning. I was still half asleep. I didn’t really know what was happening. They read him his Miranda rights, cuffed him and took him away. He just kept saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags, I didn’t do it”.’ She glanced up at Li, a hint of what he took to be something close to shame in her eyes. ‘And I believed him. Or, at least, I wanted to.’

She shook her head. ‘The trial was a nightmare. He pled not guilty, of course. But there was overwhelming forensic and DNA evidence against him. The prosecution said he’d been drinking and that he couldn’t take the rejection when the girl said no. They said he was used to getting his way with young girls, attractive, impressionable students falling at his feet year after year. A procession of them came to the witness stand and went through their affairs with him in graphic detail.’ She took a moment to control herself. ‘The thing is, I knew it was true. Everything they said. It was just Michael. I was so angry — with myself, for not having seen it. I could believe it of him so easily. I just couldn’t believe he was a murderer. My family, my friends, everyone thought the same. He’d been a rat. Sure. But kill someone? Michael? No, not Michael. Not dear, sweet, intelligent Michael with all his great liberal ideas and his concern for humankind.

‘So I did everything in my power to try to undermine the scientific evidence against him. The blood, the semen, the fibres collected at the scene. Contaminated. All contaminated. Sloppy police work, I said. His legal team did a good job. But not good enough. He was no O. J. Simpson. He couldn’t afford the best. The trial lasted three weeks and it took every penny we had. We lost the apartment, the automobile. I moved in with a friend.’ She paused, lost for a long time in private thought. ‘The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to life. And still he was saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags. You gotta believe me, I didn’t do it”. So I started borrowing money to kick off the appeals procedure. But it wasn’t going well, and he was more and more depressed every time I went to see him. And then one night I got a phone call. He’d hanged himself in his cell. He was dead. It was over, and I could always believe he was innocent. The victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. That’s what my folks said, and my friends. They were really supportive. I cried for about twelve hours, till I got that I was aching so much I couldn’t feel a thing.

‘Then the next day I get this letter through the door. It’s his handwriting. I knew it right away. It was like he’d come back from the dead, and I still wasn’t used to him not being alive. It didn’t say much.’ She bit her lip as she remembered. ‘“Dear Mags, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. But I just can’t go on living with this. I never meant to kill her. I hope you’ll believe that. I’ll always love you. Mikey.”’ Big, silent tears ran down Margaret’s cheeks. ‘He couldn’t live with it. But he made damn sure I had to. Like he was passing on all the guilt. He killed that girl. He raped her and then he hit her again and again and again until he had smashed her skull. He had lied to me about everything. Why couldn’t he have lied to me one last time?’ She put her fist to her mouth and bit down hard on the knuckles. Li stretched over and pulled it gently away and held her hand as she sobbed, and the tears splashed in great heavy drops on the table, glistening in the flickering candlelight.

It was several minutes before she could speak again. Her tissue was sodden, her eyes red and swollen, her cheeks blotched. ‘I never told anyone before,’ she said. ‘About the letter. It was easier to let everyone else go on believing the lie, or at least hold back from giving them a reason not to.’

‘Does it help?’ he asked gently. ‘Having told me?’

‘It may not look like it.’ She half laughed through the tears. ‘But I haven’t felt this good in months.’

She didn’t know why she had told him. Perhaps because he was a stranger, a long way from her life back home, from her friends and her family; because in a few weeks she would be getting on a plane and flying back across the Pacific and would never see him again; because she felt close to him, drawn by his deep, dark eyes and the sensitivity she knew they reflected. But maybe simply because she had needed to tell someone. Anyone. The burden of guilt and hurt and confusion had just become too much to bear. And already she felt the weight of it lifted from her. But she was glad it was Li, and in those moments she felt as close to him as she had felt to anyone in years.

Li, too, was wondering why she had told him. It was almost scary to be the recipient of something so personal, to share in so much of someone else’s pain. He felt privileged, too. She had made herself supremely vulnerable, demonstrating an enormous trust in him, even if she was getting on a plane in five weeks’ time to fly out of his life for ever. He had never, in his thirty-three years, felt so drawn to someone as he was to Margaret now. He was frightened to speak, to do anything that would spoil the moment or bring it to an end. Her hand felt very small in his. He ran his thumb lightly over the Mekong delta of blue veins that ran down the back of it, and felt the pulsing of her blood. He wanted to hold her whole body to him, and feel its life and its warmth and keep it safe. But he did nothing. Said nothing.