Linger Awhile

39 Ralph Darling

4 February 2004. The emptiness left by Rachael’s death was bigger than whatever else there was around it. All those years of her gone! After I saw Detective Inspector Hunter I went home and arranged for my foreman to run the farm for me, then I booked a room for two weeks at the Regent Palace Hotel near Piccadilly Circus. Every morning I woke up and looked out of my window at a row of orange wheelie bins with a row of scooters and motorbikes in front of them in Glasshouse Street. Eros was not part of my view. Every day I walked up Brewer Street to Lexington near the corner of Beak, the spot where Hunter thought Rachael had been killed. I had a feeling that the person or thing that had killed her might return to it. I knew that Rachael was with me and I sensed that I could tune into her killer through her.

People came and went. Day after day and night after night nothing happened until yesterday evening. The dark came early and the street lamps didn’t so much illuminate as just give everything a yellowish cast. I could feel a lurking presence — I could almost see a dim shape as if I were wearing night-vision goggles. Whatever it was was coming closer. I had no weapon but there was a skip full of rubbish and I saw the legs of a wooden chair sticking out of it. I broke off a chair leg and waited. Somebody got between me and the dim shape and I said, ‘Get out of the way!’ but he didn’t, and it was on him. Everything went into slow motion then, I couldn’t see very well and it took me a long time to get to where it was happening. I saw it clearly then, a young woman bending over the man on the ground. She had her teeth in his neck and she looked up at me with blood running down her chin. It was like a Hammer horror film. I knocked her away from the man with the chair leg, then I grabbed her by the hair and jammed the chair leg into what I hoped was her heart. She let out a terrible scream and a geyser of blood shot up out of her. Then she became black-and-white, then flat, then nothing but dust blowing in the wind. There was no blood on the pavement. The chair leg was lying there but she was gone and the man was dead. He was Chinese.

‘Was that the one that killed you?’ I said to Rachael, and I felt a heaviness go away from me so I knew I’d got it right. I walked back through the noise and dirt of London to the Regent Palace Hotel and in the morning I checked out and went home.