The First Cut

25 Martha

Saturday brought Martha two important pieces of news: one that she had been expecting, and another that changed everything.

The day started as usual with a wink from the old man and a glare from his wife at breakfast. Martha wasn’t very hungry, so she skipped the cereal and just picked at her bacon and eggs. She was wondering whether to move out that day and find somewhere else in another part of the town. It seemed a good idea. People were getting far too used to her here, and there might come a time when awkward questions would be asked.

After breakfast, she went back up to her room and packed her gear in the holdall. She had one last smoke there, leaning on the windowsill and looking left and right, from the close and overbearing St. Hilda’s to the distant St. Mary’s. It was the first overcast day in the entire week. A chill wind had blown in off the North Sea, bringing the scent of rain with it. Already a light drizzle was falling, like a thin mist enveloping the town. Visibility was poor, and St. Mary’s looked like the blurred gray ghost of a church on top of its hill.

After checking the room once more to make sure she had forgotten nothing, Martha padded downstairs and found the proprietor helping his wife carry the dirty dishes through to the kitchen.

“I’d like to settle up now, if that’s all right,” she said.

“Fine.” He wiped his hands on the grubby white apron he was wearing. “I’ll make out the bill.”

Martha waited in the hallway. The usual flyers about Whitby ’s scenic attractions, restaurants and entertainments lay on the polished wood table by the registration book. On the wall above was a mirror. Martha examined herself. What she had done hadn’t changed her appearance. She looked no different from when she had arrived: same too-thin lips, tilted nose and almond eyes, the same untidy cap of light brown hair. All she needed was pointed ears, she thought, and she might be able to pass for a Vulcan.

“Here you are.” The man eyed her with amusement as he handed over the bill. Martha checked the total and pulled the correct amount from her wallet.

“Cash?” He seemed surprised.

“That’s right.” She didn’t want to use checks or credit cards; they could be too easily traced. She had cashed her father’s check and emptied her bank account before she set off for Whitby, so she had quite a bit of money-not all of it so obviously bulging out of her wallet, but hidden away in the holdall’s “secret” pockets.

“I suppose you’ll need a receipt?”

For a second she was puzzled. Why would she want a receipt?

“For tax purposes,” he went on.

“Oh. Yes, please.”

“Hang on.”

Tax purposes? Of course! She was supposed to be a writer here to do research. She could deduct her expenses from her income tax. She was slipping, forgetting the details.

The man returned and handed her a slip of paper. “I hope the book’s a success,” he said. “Certainly plenty of atmosphere in Whitby. I don’t read romances myself, but the wife does. We’ll look out for it.”

“Yes, please do,” Martha said. She wanted to tell him it was an academic, historical work, but somehow that just didn’t seem important now. It was all lies anyway: romance or history, what did it matter? “Thank you very much,” she said, and walked out of the door.

It really was cool outside. She had been intending to carry the quilted jacket over her arm, but she put it on instead as she set off on her usual morning trek to the Monk’s Haven. She wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of the day. Maybe go up to St. Mary’s again and shut herself in the box pew. She hadn’t felt as safe and secure in years as she had the previous day up there. And then she would have to find another B amp;B to stay at.

The rain smelled of dead fish and seaweed. Browsers on Silver Street and Flowergate wore plastic macs or carried brollies, and fathers held on to their children’s hands. Martha thought that was odd. When the sun shone, everyone seemed more relaxed and the children ran free, swinging their buckets and spades, dancing along the pavement and bumping into people. But as soon as it rained, pedestrians drew in and held on tight to one another. It was probably some primordial fear, she decided, a throwback to primitive instinct. They weren’t aware they were doing it. After all, man was just another species of animal, despite all his inflated ideas about his place in the great chain of being. People had no idea at all why they behaved the way they did. Most of the time they were merely victims of forces beyond their control and comprehension, just as she had been.

You could only depend on reason and organization to a certain degree, Martha had discovered, and beyond that point lived monsters. Sometimes you had to cross the boundary and live with the monsters for a while. Sometimes you had no choice.

At her usual newsagent’s on the corner just past the bridge, she bought a local paper and the Independent and headed for warmth, coffee and a cigarette.

First, she picked up the local paper and found what she was looking for on the front page. It wasn’t much, just a small paragraph tucked away near the bottom, but it was the seed from which a bigger story would soon grow. BODY WASHED UP NEAR SANDSEND, the small-caps headline ran. Sandsend was only about four miles away. That was better than she’d hoped for. She thought it would have been carried further than four miles, and such an event might not seem so important in a large town like Scarborough. She read on:

The body of a man was discovered by a young couple on an isolated stretch of beach near Sandsend last night. So far, police say, the man has not been identified. Chief Superintendent Charles Kallen has asked anyone with information about a missing person to come forward and contact the police immediately. Time of death is estimated at no earlier than Thursday, and the body appears to have been drifting in the sea since then. Police had no comment to make about the cause of death.

They didn’t know very much. Or if they did, they weren’t saying. Martha would have thought it was obvious how the man had met his death. But the sea did strange things, she reminded herself. The police would probably think that his head injuries had been caused by rocks. The forensic people were clever, though, and they would soon discover at a postmortem examination what had really happened.

A little disappointed at the thinness of the story, Martha ordered another black coffee and lit her third cigarette of the day. Should she stay in town until the real news broke? she wondered. This story just seemed so flat and anticlimactic. She should hang on at least until he was identified. On the other hand, that news would make the national dailies, which she could read anywhere. No, it was best to stay. Stick close to the action. She had gone so far that it would be futile to pull out now.

Next she turned to the Independent. She didn’t expect to read anything about the discovery of Grimley’s body there, but she looked just the same. At the bottom of the second page, tucked away like a mad relation in a cellar, was a short paragraph that caught her eye. It appeared under the simple heading, ANOTHER BODY FOUND. Perhaps that was it. Martha folded the paper and read on.

Police last night say they found the body of a nineteen-year-old female on a stretch of waste ground near the University of Sheffield. Evidence suggests that the girl, a student at the university, was killed shortly after dark on Friday evening. Detective Superintendent Elswick, in charge of the field investigation, told reporters that evidence indicates the unnamed woman is the sixth victim of the killer who has come to be called the “Student Slasher.” All his victims have been female students at northern universities. Police refused to reveal the exact nature of the girl’s injuries. The killer has been operating in the north for over a year now, and there has been much criticism of the police’s handling of the investigation. When asked why the killer hadn’t been caught yet, Superintendent Elswick declined to comment.

Martha felt herself grow cold. The conversations going on around her turned to a meaningless background hum. All she could hear clearly was the litany of names running through her mind: Margaret Snell, Kathleen Shannon, Jane Pitcombe, Kim Waterford, Jill Sarsden. And now another, name unknown. Hands shaking, she lit another cigarette from the stub of her old one and read the article again. It said exactly the same, word for word. The “Student Slasher” had struck again. She had been mistaken in Grimley. She had killed the wrong man.

Choking back the vomit, she crushed out her cigarette, rushed to the tiny toilet and locked the door behind her. After bringing up her breakfast, she splashed icy water on her face and leaned against the sink breathing fast and deep. She still felt dizzy. Everything was spinning around her as if she was standing on a high balcony suffering from vertigo. Her skin felt cold and clammy; her mouth tasted dry and sour. She took a deep breath and held it. Another. Another. Her pulse began to steady.

The wrong man, she thought, sitting down on the toilet and holding her head in her hands. And she had been so damn sure. The hoarse voice, the accent, the callused hands, the low, dark fringe, the glittering eyes-it had all been right. So where did she go wrong? She couldn’t have been thinking clearly at all. It had already occurred to her that her original theory-that he was a fisherman-must have been wrong, but she had gone ahead anyway. Her search had been based on slender enough evidence from the start. Anyone else would have said that she was looking for a needle in a haystack and, what’s more, that she had no idea which haystack it was supposed to be in. But Martha had trusted her instincts. She had been sure that she would find him and that she would know him when she did. Well, so much for her bloody instincts.

Looking back, she could see that she should have known, that her perception had been flawed. He was too young, for a start, and though the voice was close, certainly in accent, it was pitched lower and had less of a rasp. The eyes and hands were the same, but there had been no deeply etched lines on his face.

How could she have let herself get carried away? This made her a murderer, pure and simple. There was no excuse. She remembered with a shudder his body twitching on the sand in the moonlight, the shattered bone and the sticky brain matter beneath her fingertips and the stifling sea-wrack smell of the cave. She had killed an innocent man. A man who would probably have forced himself on her eventually anyway, true-but an innocent man. And now she had to live with it.

She got up, drank some water from the tap and washed her face. She looked pale, but not enough that people would really notice. Taking another deep breath, she unbolted the door and walked back to her table. She seemed steady enough on her feet. She hoped nobody in the café had seen the way she had panicked. Still, they would have no idea why. Her coffee had cooled down, but the cigarette, improperly stubbed out, still smoldered in the ashtray. The story in the folded paper stared up at her. She turned it over and stared out of the window. Holidaymakers drifted by like shades in limbo. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” she found herself thinking, but she couldn’t remember where the words came from.

Should she call the hunt off, then, go back home to the shell of a life she had made for herself? No. Even now, at such a low point, she knew she must not do that. If she did, then it all came to nothing. Grimley would have died for nothing. Only if she fulfilled her purpose, set out to do what she had to, would any of it mean anything. She was still convinced she had got the right place: she would find her man in Whitby, or somewhere very close by. He was still here.

She grieved for Jack Grimley, would do anything to undo what she had done. But, she reminded herself, this was a war of a kind, and in war there are no innocent bystanders. Grimley might have been a good person, but he was still a man. To Martha, all men were potentially the same as the one she sought. Grimley, given the chance, would have led her into one of those caves and tried to rip her clothes off and…It didn’t bear thinking about. Men were all the same, all violators and murderers of women. No doubt the real “Student Slasher” was an ordinary, well-respected citizen on the outside. Maybe he even had a wife and children. But Martha didn’t care about that. She just wanted to kill him.

Why did he travel inland so often? Was it just because that was where the universities were, or was it something to do with his work? She could no longer bank on his being a fisherman, after all, so maybe he was a traveling salesman based in Whitby. This was the kind of thing she had to do now-think again, plan again, act again. She couldn’t let herself get dragged down by one mistake, no matter how horrifying it was. She had simply been too eager, too sure of herself, too impatient. She would have to focus more clearly on the task ahead, bring her intellect into harmony with her instinct. So start by thinking, she told herself. He travels inland frequently. Why? There, at least, was something concrete, a place to start.

“Anything else, love?”

“What?”

It was the waitress clearing away the empty table next to hers. “Another cup of coffee?”

“Yes, all right.” Her last one had gone cold, anyway, Martha remembered.

“You stay there and I’ll bring it over, love. You’re looking a bit peaky. Had a shock?”

Martha shook her head. “Thank you. No, no. Nothing serious.” She would have to watch herself, she realized. It wouldn’t do at all if she went around town making a spectacle of herself. People would remember her.

When the waitress had brought the coffee, Martha returned to her thoughts. She knew that Superintendent Elswick and his minions would be wasting their time trying to figure out the killer’s motives and come up with a psychological profile. It hadn’t got them very far yet, had it? But she didn’t give a damn about the man’s unhappy childhood or the time he’d been forced to kiss his dead grandmother. Maybe his mother had abandoned him and gone to university. Perhaps that was why he always attacked young female students. Perhaps he had a daughter who had been corrupted as a student. Or maybe he just thought university campuses were dens of iniquity, full of sluts and sex-crazed bitches, the kind of place he was most likely to find loose women-and women liberated, careless or foolish enough to walk home alone in the dark. Again, she didn’t care. When she found him she wasn’t going to psychoanalyze him. She was going to kill him. Simple as that.

The rush of thoughts lifted Martha’s spirits. It proved that her mind was working clearly again and that she could harden herself against experience, as she had to. When she looked back on what she had done the other night, keeping the grotesque images at bay, she saw that there was good in it, too. It hadn’t really been a wasted effort at all. If she looked at it from a positive viewpoint, she could see killing Grimley as a kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing. A horrible thought, perhaps, but at least now she knew she could go through with it. Grimley’s murder had also been an initiation of a kind, a baptism in blood. She had killed once; therefore, she could kill again. Only next time, she thought, fingering the paperweight in her holdall, she would be certain to get it right.