Equinox

Chapter 4

The wind rattled the windows in Laura's room in Philip's house and she drifted in and out of a disturbed sleep, dreaming the same thing she always dreamed on nights like this one: a dream that was not a dream, more a distorted memory.

It began with her flying over Los Angeles. It was night and she was going to visit her parents at their respective California homes soon after she had moved back to New York. They were over the outer suburbs before the pilot even announced that the plane was beginning its descent. Ten minutes later she was over the city proper and the plane was banking slowly to the north, moving up parallel to the coast. She could see the city now, all lit up, like a galaxy, like one of those incredible images from the Hubble telescope. And each car was a star, and each house a little solar system, a solar system of lights. The pollution in the air made them twinkle and fray.

Laura had taken this flight before of course, maybe a dozen times, but never at night, and it was just amazing. And then she saw it. She was staring at the lights, this show of defiance, humankind sticking up a finger to the gods, pure chutzpah. It reared up, the 1-405 with its million automobiles. But from three thousand feet up it looked nothing like a road. She could see no crash barriers, no tarmac, no borders, just a black strip between the lights. And the dots of sodium light — they could not be cars, could they? They had become disembodied, mere headlights moving by their own volition, just lights. It was then that it struck her, the whole view, the bigger picture, the long strips containing all those lights, all moving in strict columns, six lanes either way, dot after dot after dot, all moving together. For a moment back there they had been metal containers carrying Stan or Jim or Tabitha, taking them home to little Jimmy, to Dorothy and Delores: they had been just lights, they had been bubbles of humanity, cocoons with music spilling from the radio. They had been, in her mind at least, bundles of thought, packets of longings, desires and memories, worries and frailties. But then that moment had passed and now the dots had become something else. The freeway had become a blood vessel and the dots of light, the disembodied lights had become corpuscles, the red cells of the brake lights and the white of the headlights streaming up and down along an artery of a darkened body that must be lying down there somewhere, invisible in the glare.

She jolted awake and sat up. Squinting at the clock, she could see that the time was 5.32 a.m. It was blowing a gale outside. Then she remembered that Jo had been out when they had returned home just before midnight. She hadn't heard her come in.

Laura was now wide awake and the images of the pale body she had seen in the car came rushing back. There had been blood and gore all over the inside of the car. Those things she was used to, but then she remembered the girl's chest splayed — the view she'd had when she'd stood close to the car, next to Monroe. The ribs looked like they had been cut through with a specialist's tool, something that a surgeon would use. The cut had been made with absolute precision, no effort wasted. Then she could see again the severed arteries and veins, the sliced edges of the heart's plumbing. They too had been snipped precisely, expertly.

She laid her head back on the pillow, refusing to give up on sleep, trying to rid herself of the images and to focus on her own life. Her suitcases were packed and stood at the foot of the bed. She was leaving for the airport at 10 a.m. By tomorrow night she would be back in Greenwich Village, back in her apartment trying to revive her dead plants and searching for a way into the new book. The new book, God, that was going nowhere, she recalled suddenly, and with this recollection sleep slipped further away.

Laura tried to grasp the plot that she had worked through, to disappear into a fantasy world. It was a trick she had used before and it often worked against insomnia, but tonight nothing seemed to take her away from the immediate moment.

Then she was back at the crime scene again. . Monroe picking up that coin between latexed fingers. It had glistened in the illumination from the floodlights, glistened except where the blood had caked and dried. She had never seen anything quite like it before. It looked extremely old. And to her untrained eye it certainly appeared to be gold, old gold. Why, she thought, would anyone leave such a thing behind? Apart from the fact that it was giving away clues, it must have been worth a fortune.

Philip had been quite right to be so furious with her, but Laura knew there was much more to it. There could be no coincidence in the fact that his outburst had happened the night before she was due to return home to New York. It was the old resentments rising again. He felt that she had deserted him all those years ago, even though they had both known — and now knew definitely — that they could never have coped. These past three weeks had been wonderful, and she could admit that sometimes she had found herself slipping into a fantasy in which they really were a family, that she lived here in this seventeenth-century house in a village close to Oxford, that Jo had grown up with them, together. The fantasy felt nice.

Laura had become so wrapped up in these thoughts that at first she did not hear the phone ring in the hall downstairs. Then came the sound of Philip's door opening and his heavy tread as he stumbled along the corridor and down the steep, winding staircase. She could hear him speaking, but couldn't make out what he was saying. Then the receiver was replaced and she heard him take the stairs back up. Now he was moving fast. A few moments later there came an urgent knock on her door and it swung inwards.

'It's Jo,' Philip said, his face looking pale and drained in the light from the hall. 'She's been in a car accident. She's at the John Radcliffe.'