The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

SEE HOW THEY RUN by Ramsey Campbell

Throughout the reading of the charges Foulsham felt as if the man in the dock was watching him. December sunshine like ice transmuted into illumination slanted through the high windows of the courtroom, spotlighting the murderer. With his round slightly pouting face and large dark moist eyes Fishwick resembled a schoolboy caught red-handed, Foulsham thought, except that surely no schoolboy would have confronted the prospect of retribution with such a look of imperfectly concealed amusement mingled with impatience.

The indictment was completed. “How do you plead?”

“Not guilty,” Fishwick said in a high clear voice with just a hint of mischievous emphasis on the first word. Foulsham had the impression that he was tempted to take a bow, but instead Fishwick folded his arms and glanced from the prosecuting counsel to the defense, cueing their speeches so deftly that Foulsham felt his own lips twitch.

“… a series of atrocities so cold-blooded that the jury may find it almost impossible to believe that any human being could be capable of them…” “… evidence that a brilliant mind was tragically damaged by a lifetime of abuse…” Fishwick met both submissions with precisely the same attitude, eyebrows slightly raised, a forefinger drumming on his upper arm as though he were commenting in code on the proceedings. His look of lofty patience didn’t change as one of the policemen who had arrested him gave evidence, and Foulsham sensed that Fishwick was eager to get to the meat of the case. But the judge adjourned the trial for the day, and Fishwick contented himself with a faint anticipatory smirk.

The jurors were escorted past the horde of reporters and through the business district to their hotel. Rather to Foulsham’s surprise, none of his fellow jurors mentioned Fishwick, neither over dinner nor afterward, when the jury congregated in the cavernous lounge as if they were reluctant to be alone. Few of the jurors showed much enthusiasm for breakfast, so that Foulsham felt slightly guilty for clearing his plate. He was the last to leave the table and the first to reach the door of the hotel, telling himself that he wanted to be done with the day’s ordeal. Even the sight of a newsvendor’s placard which proclaimed FISHWICK JURY SEE HORROR PICTURES TODAY failed to deter him.

Several of the jurors emitted sounds of distress as the pictures were passed along the front row. A tobacconist shook his head over them, a gesture which seemed on the point of growing uncontrollable. Some of Foulsham’s companions on the back row craned forward for a preview, but Foulsham restrained himself; they were here to be dispassionate, after all. As the pictures came toward him, their progress marked by growls of outrage and murmurs of dismay, he began to feel unprepared, in danger of performing clumsily in front of the massed audience. When at last the pictures reached him, he gazed at them for some time without looking up.

They weren’t as bad as he had secretly feared. Indeed, what struck him most was their economy and skill. With just a few strokes of a black felt-tipped pen, and the occasional embellishment of red, Fishwick had captured everything he wanted to convey about his subjects: the grotesqueness which had overtaken their gait as they attempted to escape once he’d severed a muscle; the way the crippled dance of each victim gradually turned into a crawl—into less than that once Fishwick had dealt with both arms. No doubt he’d been as skillful with the blade as he was with the pen. Foulsham was reexamining the pictures when the optician next to him nudged him. “The rest of us have to look, too, you know.”

Foulsham waited several seconds before looking up. Everyone in the courtroom was watching the optician now—everyone but Fishwick. This time there was no question that the man in the dock was gazing straight at Foulsham, whose face stiffened into a mask he wanted to believe was expressionless. He was struggling to look away when the last juror gave an appalled cry and began to crumple the pictures. The judge hammered an admonition, the usher rushed to reclaim the evidence, and Fishwick stared at Foulsham as if they were sharing a joke. The flurry of activity let Foulsham look away, and he did his best to copy the judge’s expression of rebuke tempered with sympathy for the distressed woman.

That night he couldn’t get to sleep for hours. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the sketches Fishwick had made. The trial wouldn’t last forever, he reminded himself; soon his life would return to normal. Every so often, as he lay in the dark which smelled of bath soap and disinfectant and carpet shampoo, the taps in the bathroom released a gout of water with a choking sound. Each time that happened, the pictures in his head lurched closer, and he felt as if he was being watched. Would he feel like that over Christmas if, as seemed likely, the trial were to continue into the new year? But it lacked almost a week to Christmas when Fishwick was called to the witness box, and Fishwick chose that moment, much to the discomfiture of his lawyer, to plead guilty after all.

The development brought gasps from the public gallery, an exodus from the press benches, mutters of disbelief and anger from the jury; but Foulsham experienced only relief. When the court rose, as though to celebrate the turn of events, he thought the case was over until he saw that the judge was withdrawing to speak to the lawyers. “The swine,” the tobacconist whispered fiercely, glaring at Fishwick. “He made all those people testify for nothing.”

Soon the judge and the lawyers returned. It had apparently been decided that the defense should call several psychiatrists to state their views of Fishwick’s mental condition. The first of them had scarcely opened his mouth, however, when Fishwick began to express impatience as severe as Foulsham sensed more than one of the jurors was suffering. The man in the dock protruded his tongue like a caricature of a madman and emitted a creditable imitation of a jolly banjo which all but drowned out the psychiatrist’s voice. Eventually the judge had Fishwick removed from the court, though not without a struggle, and the psychiatrists were heard.

Fishwick’s mother had died giving birth to him, and his father had never forgiven him. The boy’s first schoolteacher had seen the father tearing up pictures Fishwick had painted for him. There was some evidence that the father had been prone to uncontrollable fits of violence against the child, though the boy had always insisted that he had broken his own leg by falling downstairs. All of Fishwick’s achievements as a young man seemed to have antagonized the father—his exercising his leg for years until he was able to conceal his limp, his enrollment in an art college, the praise which his teachers heaped on him and which he valued less than a word of encouragement from his father. He’d been in his twenties, and still living with his father, when a gallery had offered to exhibit his work. Nobody knew what his father had said which had caused Fishwick to destroy all his paintings in despair and to overcome his disgust at working in his father’s shop in order to learn the art of butchery. Before long he had been able to rent a bed-sitter, and thirteen months after moving into it he’d tracked down one of his former schoolfellows who used to call him Quasimodo on account of his limp and his dispirited slouch. Four victims later, Fishwick had made away with his father and the law had caught up with him.

Very little of this had been leaked to the press. Foulsham found himself imagining Fishwick brooding sleeplessly in a cheerless room, his creative nature and his need to prove himself festering within him until he was unable to resist the compulsion to carry out an act which would make him feel meaningful. The other jurors were less impressed. “I might have felt some sympathy for him if he’d gone straight for his father,” the hairdresser declared once they were in the jury room.

Fishwick had taken pains to refine his technique first, Foulsham thought, and might have said so if the tobacconist hadn’t responded. “I’ve no sympathy for that cold fish,” the man said between puffs at a briar. “You can see he’s still enjoying himself. He only pleaded not guilty so that all those people would have to be reminded what they went through.”

“We can’t be sure of that,” Foulsham protested.

“More worried about him than about his victims, are you?” the tobacconist demanded, and the optician intervened. “I know it seems incredible that anyone could enjoy doing what he did,” she said to Foulsham, “but that creature’s not like us.”

Foulsham would have liked to be convinced of that. After all, if Fishwick weren’t insane, mustn’t that mean anyone was capable of such behavior? “I think he pleaded guilty when he realized that everyone was going to hear all those things about him he wanted to keep secret,” he said. “I think he thought that if he pleaded guilty the psychiatrists wouldn’t be called.”

The eleven stared at him. “You think too much,” the tobacconist said.

The hairdresser broke the awkward silence by clearing her throat. “I never thought I’d say this, but I wish they’d bring back hanging just for him.”

“That’s the Christmas present he deserves,” said the veterinarian who had crumpled the evidence.

The foreman of the jury, a bank manager, proposed that it was time to discuss what they’d learned at the trial. “Personally, I don’t mind where they lock him up so long as they throw away the key.”

His suggestion didn’t satisfy most of the jurors. The prosecuting counsel had questioned the significance of the psychiatric evidence, and the judge had hinted broadly in his summing-up that it was inconclusive. It took all the jurors apart from Foulsham less than half an hour to dismiss the notion that Fishwick might have been unable to distinguish right from wrong, and then they gazed expectantly at Foulsham, who had a disconcerting sense that Fishwick was awaiting his decision, too. “I don’t suppose it matters where they lock him up,” he began, and got no further; the rest of the jury responded with cheers and applause, which sounded ironic to him. Five minutes later they’d agreed to recommend a life sentence for each of Fishwick’s crimes. “That should keep him out of mischief,” the bank manager exulted.

As the jury filed into the courtroom, Fishwick leaned forward to scrutinize their faces. His own was blank. The foreman stood up to announce the verdict, and Foulsham was suddenly grateful to have that done on his behalf. He hoped Fishwick would be put away for good. When the judge confirmed six consecutive life sentences, Foulsham released a breath which he hadn’t been aware of holding. Fishwick had shaken his head when asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed, and his face seemed to lose its definition as he listened to the judge’s pronouncement. His gaze trailed across the jury as he was led out of the dock.

Once Foulsham was out of the building, in the crowded streets above which glowing Santas had been strung up, he didn’t feel as liberated as he’d hoped. Presumably that would happen when sleep had caught up with him. Just now he was uncomfortably aware how all the mannequins in the store windows had been twisted into posing. Whenever shoppers turned from gazing into a window he thought they were emerging from the display. As he dodged through the shopping precinct, trying to avoid shoppers rendered angular by packages, families mined with small children, clumps of onlookers surrounding the open suitcases of street traders, he felt as if the maze of bodies were crippling his progress.

Foulsham’s had obviously been thriving in his absence. The shop was full of people buying Christmas cards and rolled-up posters and framed prints. “Are you glad it’s over?” Annette asked him. “He won’t ever be let out, will he?”

“Was he as horrible as the papers made out?” Jackie was eager to know.

“I can’t say. I didn’t see them,” Foulsham admitted, experiencing a surge of panic as Jackie produced a pile of tabloids from under the counter. “I’d rather forget,” he said hastily.

“You don’t need to read about it, Mr Foulsham, you lived through it,” Annette said. “You look as though Christmas can’t come too soon for you.”

“If I oversleep tomorrow I’ll be in on Monday,” Foulsham promised, and trudged out of the shop.

All the taxis were taken, and so he had to wait almost half an hour for a bus. If he hadn’t been so exhausted he might have walked home. As the bus laboured uphill he clung to the dangling strap which was looped around his wrist and stared at a grimacing rubber clown whose limbs were struggling to unbend from the bag into which they’d been forced. Bodies swayed against him like meat in a butcher’s lorry, until he was afraid of being trapped out of reach of the doors when the bus came to his stop.

As he climbed his street, where frost glittered as if the tarmac were reflecting the sky, he heard children singing carols in the distance or on television. He let himself into the house on the brow of the hill, and the poodles in the ground-floor flat began to yap as though he were a stranger. They continued barking while he sorted through the mail which had accumulated on the hall table: bills, advertisements, Christmas cards from people he hadn’t heard from since last year. “Only me, Mrs Hutton,” he called as he heard her and her stick plodding through her rooms toward the clamor. Jingling his keys as further proof of his identity, and feeling unexpectedly like a jailor, he hurried upstairs and unlocked his door.

Landscapes greeted him. Two large framed paintings flanked the window of the main room: a cliff bearing strata of ancient stone above a deserted beach, fields spiky with hedgerows and tufted with sheep below a horizon where a spire poked at fat clouds as though to pop them; beyond the window, the glow of streetlamps streamed downhill into a pool of light miles wide from which pairs of headlight beams were flocking. The pleasure and the sense of all-embracing calm which he habitually experienced on coming home seemed to be standing back from him. He dumped his suitcase in the bedroom and hung up his coat, then he took the radio into the kitchen.

He didn’t feel like eating much. He finished off a slice of toast laden with baked beans, and wondered whether Fishwick had eaten yet, and what his meal might be. As soon as he’d sluiced plate and fork he made for his armchair with the radio. Before long, however, he’d had enough of the jazz age. Usually the dance music of that era roused his nostalgia for innocence, not least because the music was older than he was, but just now it seemed too good to be true. So did the views on the wall and beyond the window, and the programs on the television—the redemption of a cartoon Scrooge, commercials chortling “Ho ho ho,” an appeal on behalf of people who would be on their own at Christmas, a choir reiterating “Let nothing you display,” the syntax of which he couldn’t grasp. As his mind fumbled with it, his eyelids drooped. He nodded as though agreeing with himself that he had better switch off the television, and then he was asleep.

Fishwick wakened him. Agony flared through his right leg. As he lurched out of the chair, trying to blink away the blur which coated his eyes, he was afraid the leg would fail him. He collapsed back into the chair, thrusting the leg in front of him, digging his fingers into the calf in an attempt to massage away the cramp. When at last he was able to bend the leg without having to grit his teeth, he set about recalling what had invaded his sleep.

The nine o’clock news had been ending. It must have been a newsreader who had spoken Fishwick’s name. Foulsham hadn’t been fully awake, after all; no wonder he’d imagined that the voice sounded like the murderer’s. Perhaps it had been the hint of amusement which his imagination had seized upon, though would a newsreader have sounded amused? He switched off the television and waited for the news on the local radio station, twinges in his leg ensuring that he stayed awake.

He’d forgotten that there was no ten o’clock news. He attempted to phone the radio station, but five minutes of hanging on brought him only a message like an old record on which the needle had stuck, advising him to try later. By eleven he’d hobbled to bed. The newsreader raced through accounts of violence and drunken driving, then rustled her script. “Some news just in,” she said. “Police report that convicted murderer Desmond Fishwick has taken his own life while in custody. Full details in our next bulletin.”

That would be at midnight. Foulsham tried to stay awake, not least because he didn’t understand how, if the local station had only just received the news, the national network could have broadcast it more than ninety minutes earlier. But when midnight came he was asleep. He wakened in the early hours and heard voices gabbling beside him, insomniacs trying to assert themselves on a phone-in program before the presenter cut them short. Foulsham switched off the radio and imagined the city riddled with cells in which people lay or paced, listening to the babble of their own caged obsessions. At least one of them—Fishwick—had put himself out of his misery. Foulsham massaged his leg until the ache relented sufficiently to let sleep overtake him.

The morning newscast said that Fishwick had killed himself last night, but little else. The tabloids were less reticent, Foulsham discovered once he’d dressed and hurried to the newsagent’s. MANIAC’S BLOODY SUICIDE. SAVAGE KILLER SAVAGES HIMSELF. HE BIT OFF MORE THAN HE COULD CHEW. Fishwick had gnawed the veins out of his arms and died from loss of blood.

He must have been insane to do that to himself, Foulsham thought, clutching his heavy collar shut against a vicious wind as he limped downhill. While bathing he’d been tempted to take the day off, but now he didn’t want to be alone with the images which the news had planted in him. Everyone around him on the bus seemed to be reading one or other of the tabloids which displayed Fishwick’s face on the front page like posters for the suicide, and he felt as though all the paper eyes were watching him. Once he was off the bus he stuffed his newspaper into the nearest bin.

Annette and Jackie met him with smiles which looked encouraging yet guarded, and he knew they’d heard about the death. The shop was already full of customers buying last-minute cards and presents for people they’d almost forgotten, and it was late morning before the staff had time for a talk. Foulsham braced himself for the onslaught of questions and comments, only to find that Jackie and Annette were avoiding the subject of Fishwick, waiting for him to raise it so that they would know how he felt, not suspecting that he didn’t know himself. He tried to lose himself in the business of the shop, to prove to them that they needn’t be so careful of him; he’d never realised how much their teasing and joking meant to him. But they hardly spoke to him until the last customer had departed, and then he sensed that they’d discussed what to say to him. “Don’t you let it matter to you, Mr Foulsham. He didn’t,” Annette said.

“Don’t you dare let it spoil your evening,” Jackie told him.

She was referring to the staff’s annual dinner. While he hadn’t quite forgotten about it, he seemed to have gained an impression that it hadn’t much to do with him. He locked the shop and headed for home to get changed. After twenty minutes of waiting in a bus queue whose disgruntled mutters felt like flies bumbling mindlessly around him he walked home, the climb aggravating his limp.

He put on his dress shirt and bow tie and slipped his dark suit out of the bag in which it had been hanging since its January visit to the cleaners. As soon as he was dressed he went out again, away from the sounds of Mrs. Hutton’s three-legged trudge and of the dogs, which hadn’t stopped barking since he had entered the house. Nor did he care for the way Mrs. Hutton had opened her door and peered at him with a suspiciousness which hadn’t entirely vanished when she saw him.

He was at the restaurant half an hour before the rest of the party. He sat at the bar, sipping a Scotch and then another, thinking of people who must do so every night in preference to sitting alone at home, though might some of them be trying to avoid doing something worse? He was glad when his party arrived, Annette and her husband, Jackie and her new boyfriend, even though Annette’s greeting as he stood up disconcerted him. “Are you all right, Mr. Foulsham?” she said, and he felt unpleasantly wary until he realised that she must be referring to his limp.

By the time the turkey arrived at the table, the party had opened a third bottle of wine and the conversation had floated loose. “What was he like, Mr. Foulsham,” Jackie’s boyfriend said, “the feller you put away?”

Annette coughed delicately. “Mr. Foulsham may not want to talk about it.”

“It’s all right, Annette. Perhaps I should. He was—” Foulsham said, and trailed off, wishing that he’d taken advantage of the refuge she was offering. “Maybe he was just someone whose mind gave way.”

“I hope you’ve no regrets,” Annette’s husband said. “You should be proud.”

“Of what?”

“Of stopping the killing. He won’t kill anyone else.”

Foulsham couldn’t argue with that, and yet he felt uneasy, especially when Jackie’s boyfriend continued to interrogate him. If Fishwick didn’t matter, as Annette had insisted when Foulsham was closing the shop, why was everyone so interested in hearing about him? He felt as though they were resurrecting the murderer, in Foulsham’s mind if nowhere else. He tried to describe Fishwick, and related as much of his own experience of the trial as he judged they could stomach. All that he left unsaid seemed to gather in his mind, especially the thought of Fishwick extracting the veins from his arms.

Annette and her husband gave him a lift home. He meant to invite them up for coffee and brandy, but the poodles started yapping the moment he climbed out of the car. “Me again, Mrs. Hutton,” he slurred as he hauled himself along the banister. He switched on the light in his main room and gazed at the landscapes on the wall, but his mind couldn’t grasp them. He brushed his teeth and drank as much water as he could take, then he huddled under the blankets, willing the poodles to shut up.

He didn’t sleep for long. He kept wakening with a stale rusty taste in his mouth. He’d drunk too much, that was why he felt so hot and sticky and closed in. When he eased himself out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, the dogs began to bark. He rinsed out his mouth but was unable to determine if the water which he spat into the sink was discolored. He crept out of the bathroom with a glass of water in each hand and crawled shivering into bed, trying not to grind his teeth as pictures which he would have given a good deal not to see rushed at him out of the dark.

In the morning he felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He lay in the creeping sunlight, too exhausted either to sleep or to get up, until he heard the year’s sole Sunday delivery sprawl on the doormat. He washed and dressed gingerly, cursing the poodles, whose yapping felt like knives emerging from his skull, and stumbled down to the hall.

He lined up the new cards on his mantelpiece, where there was just enough room for them. Last year he’d had to stick cards onto a length of parcel tape and hang them from the cornice. This year cards from businesses outnumbered those from friends, unless tomorrow restored the balance. He was signing cards in response to some of the Sunday delivery when he heard Mrs. Hutton and the poodles leave the house.

He limped to the window and looked down on her. The two leashes were bunched in her left hand, her right was clenched on her stick. She was leaning backward as the dogs ran her downhill, and he had never seen her look so crippled. He turned away, unsure why he found the spectacle disturbing. Perhaps he should catch up on his sleep while the dogs weren’t there to trouble it, except that if he slept now he might be guaranteeing himself another restless night. The prospect of being alone in the early hours and unable to sleep made him so nervous that he grabbed the phone before he had thought who he could ask to visit.

Nobody had time for him today. Of the people ranked on the mantelpiece, two weren’t at home, two were fluttery with festive preparations, one was about to drive several hundred miles to collect his parents, one was almost incoherent with a hangover. All of them invited Foulsham to visit them over Christmas, most of them sounding sincere, but that wouldn’t take care of Sunday. He put on his overcoat and gloves and hurried downhill by a route designed to avoid Mrs. Hutton, and bought his Sunday paper on the way to a pub lunch.

The Bloody Mary wasn’t quite the remedy he was hoping for. The sight of the liquid discomforted him, and so did the scraping of the ice cubes against his teeth. Nor was he altogether happy with his lunch; the leg of chicken put him in mind of the process of severing it from the body. When he’d eaten as much as he could hold down, he fled.

The papery sky was smudged with darker clouds, images too nearly erased to be distinguishable. Its light seemed to permeate the city, reducing its fabric to little more than cardboard. He felt more present than anything around him, a sensation which he didn’t relish. He closed his eyes until he thought of someone to visit, a couple who’d lived in the house next to his and whose Christmas card invited him to drop in whenever he was passing their new address.

A double-decker bus on which he was the only passenger carried him across town and deposited him at the edge of the new suburb. The streets of squat houses which looked squashed by their tall roofs were deserted, presumably cleared by the Christmas television shows he glimpsed through windows, and his isolation made him feel watched. He limped into the suburb, glancing at the street names.

He hadn’t realized the suburb was so extensive. At the end of almost an hour of limping and occasionally resting, he still hadn’t found the address. The couple weren’t on the phone, or he would have tried to contact them. He might have abandoned the quest if he hadn’t felt convinced that he was about to come face-to-face with the name which, he had to admit, had slipped his mind. He hobbled across an intersection and then across its twin, where a glance to the left halted him. Was that the street he was looking for? Certainly the name seemed familiar. He strolled along the pavement, trying to conceal his limp, and stopped outside a house.

Though he recognized the number, it hadn’t been on the card. His gaze crawled up the side of the house and came to rest on the window set into the roof. At once he knew that he’d heard the address read aloud in the courtroom. It was where Fishwick had lived.

As Foulsham gazed fascinated at the small high window he imagined Fishwick gloating over the sketches he’d brought home, knowing that the widow from whom he rented the bed-sitter was downstairs and unaware of his secret. He came to himself with a shudder, and stumbled away, almost falling. He was so anxious to put the city between himself and Fishwick’s room that he couldn’t bear to wait for one of the infrequent Sunday buses. By the time he reached home, he was gritting his teeth so as not to scream at the ache in his leg. “Shut up,” he snarled at the alarmed poodles, “or I’ll—” and stumbled upstairs.

The lamps of the city were springing alight. Usually he enjoyed the spectacle, but now he felt compelled to look for Fishwick’s window among the distant roofs. Though he couldn’t locate it, he was certain that the windows were mutually visible. How often might Fishwick have gazed across the city toward him? Foulsham searched for tasks to distract himself—cleaned the oven, dusted the furniture and the tops of the picture frames, polished all his shoes, lined up the tins on the kitchen shelves in alphabetical order. When he could no longer ignore the barking which his every movement provoked, he went downstairs and rapped on Mrs. Hutton’s door.

She seemed reluctant to face him. Eventually he heard her shooing the poodles into her kitchen before she came to peer out at him. “Been having a good time, have we?” she demanded.

“It’s the season,” he said without an inkling of why he should need to justify himself. “Am I bothering your pets somehow?”

“Maybe they don’t recognize your walk since you did whatever you did to yourself.”

“It happened while I was asleep.” He’d meant to engage her in conversation so that she would feel bound to invite him in—he was hoping that would give the dogs a chance to grow used to him again—but he couldn’t pursue his intentions when she was so openly hostile, apparently because she felt entitled to the only limp in the building. “Happy Christmas to you and yours,” he flung at her, and hobbled back to his floor.

He wrote out his Christmas card list in case he had overlooked anyone, only to discover that he couldn’t recall some of the names to which he had already addressed cards. When he began doodling, slashing at the page so as to sketch stick figures whose agonized contortions felt like a revenge he was taking, he turned the sheet over and tried to read a book. The yapping distracted him, as did the sound of Mrs. Hutton’s limp; he was sure she was exaggerating it to lay claim to the gait or to mock him. He switched on the radio and searched the wavebands, coming to rest at a choir which was wishing the listener a merry Christmas. He turned up the volume to blot out the noise from below, until Mrs. Hutton thumped on her ceiling and the yapping of the poodles began to lurch repetitively at him as they leaped, trying to reach the enemy she was identifying with her stick.

Even his bed was no refuge. He felt as though the window on the far side of the city were an eye spying on him out of the dark, reminding him of all that he was trying not to think of before he risked sleep. During the night he found himself surrounded by capering figures which seemed determined to show him how much life was left in them—how vigorously, if unconventionally, they could dance. He managed to struggle awake at last, and lay afraid to move until the rusty taste like a memory of blood had faded from his mouth.

He couldn’t go on like this. In the morning he was so tired that he felt as if he were washing someone else’s face and hands. He thought he could feel his nerves swarming. He bared his teeth at the yapping of the dogs and tried to recapture a thought he’d glimpsed while lying absolutely still, afraid to move, in the hours before dawn. What had almost occurred to him about Fishwick’s death?

The yapping receded as he limped downhill. On the bus a woman eyed him as if she suspected him of feigning the limp in a vain attempt to persuade her to give up her seat. The city streets seemed full of people who were staring at him, though he failed to catch them in the act. When Jackie and Annette converged on the shop as he arrived, he prayed they wouldn’t mention his limp. They gazed at his face instead, making him feel they were trying to ignore his leg. “We can cope, Mr. Foulsham,” Annette said, “if you want to start your Christmas early.”

“You deserve it,” Jackie added.

What were they trying to do to him? They’d reminded him how often he might be on his own during the next few days, a prospect which filled him with dread. How could he ease his mind in the time left to him? “You’ll have to put up with another day of me,” he told them as he unlocked the door.

Their concern for him made him feel as if his every move were being observed. Even the Christmas Eve crowds failed to occupy his mind, especially once Annette took advantage of a lull in the day’s business to approach him. “We thought we’d give you your present now in case you want to change your mind about going home.”

“That’s thoughtful of you. Thank you both,” he said and retreated into the office, wondering if they were doing their best to get rid of him because something about him was playing on their nerves. He used the phone to order them a bouquet each, a present which he gave them every Christmas but which this year he’d almost forgotten, and then he picked at the parcel until he was able to see what it was.

It was a book of detective stories. He couldn’t imagine what had led them to conclude that it was an appropriate present, but it did seem to have a message for him. He gazed at the exposed spine and realized what any detective would have established days ago. Hearing Fishwick’s name in the night had been the start of his troubles, yet he hadn’t ascertained the time of Fishwick’s death.

He phoned the radio station and was put through to the newsroom. A reporter gave him all the information which the police had released. Foulsham thanked her dully and called the local newspaper, hoping they might contradict her somehow, but of course they confirmed what she’d told him. Fishwick had died just before nine-thirty on the night when his name had wakened Foulsham, and the media hadn’t been informed until almost an hour later.

He sat at his bare desk, his cindery eyes glaring at nothing, then he stumbled out of the cell of an office. The sounds and the heat of the shop seemed to rush at him and recede in waves on which the faces of Annette and Jackie and the customers were floating. He felt isolated, singled out—felt as he had throughout the trial.

Yet if he couldn’t be certain that he had been singled out then, why should he let himself feel that way now without trying to prove himself wrong? “I think I will go early after all,” he told Jackie and Annette.

Some of the shops were already closing. The streets were almost blocked with people who seemed simultaneously distant from him and too close, their insect eyes and neon faces shining. When at last he reached the alley between two office buildings near the courts, he thought he was too late. But though the shop was locked, he was just in time to catch the hairdresser. As she emerged from a back room, adjusting the strap of a shoulder-bag stuffed with presents, he tapped on the glass of the door.

She shook her head and pointed to the sign which hung against the glass. Didn’t she recognize him? His reflection seemed clear enough to him, like a photograph of himself holding the sign at his chest, even if the placard looked more real than he did. “Foulsham,” he shouted, his voice echoing from the close walls. “I was behind you on the jury. Can I have a word?”

“What about?”

He grimaced and mimed glancing both ways along the alley, and she stepped forward, halting as far from the door as the door was tall. “Well?”

“I don’t want to shout.”

She hesitated and then came to the door. He felt unexpectedly powerful, the winner of a game they had been playing. “I remember you now,” she said as she unbolted the door. “You’re the one who claimed to be sharing the thoughts of that monster.”

She stepped back as an icy wind cut through the alley, and he felt as though the weather was on his side, almost an extension of himself. “Well, spit it out,” she said as he closed the door behind him.

She was ranging about the shop, checking that the electric helmets which made him think of some outdated mental treatment were switched off, opening and closing cabinets in which blades glinted, peering beneath the chairs which put him in mind of a death cell. “Can you remember exactly when you heard what happened?” he said.

She picked up a tuft of bluish hair and dropped it in a pedal bin. “What did?”

“He killed himself.”

“Oh, that? I thought you meant something important.” The bin snapped shut like a trap. “I heard about it on the news. I really can’t say when.”

“Heard about it, though, not read it.”

“That’s what I said. Why should it matter to you?”

He couldn’t miss her emphasis on the last word, and he felt that both her contempt and the question had wakened something in him. He’d thought he wanted to reassure himself that he hadn’t been alone in sensing Fishwick’s death, but suddenly he felt altogether more purposeful. “Because it’s part of us,” he said.

“It’s no part of me, I assure you. And I don’t think I was the only member of the jury who thought you were too concerned with that fiend for your own good.”

An unfamiliar expression took hold of Foulsham’s face. “Who else did?”

“If I were you, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, I’d seek help, and quick. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not about to let that monster spoil my Christmas.” She pursed her lips and said “I’m off to meet some normal people.”

Either she thought she’d said too much or his expression and his stillness were unnerving her. “Please leave,” she said more shrilly. “Leave now or I’ll call the police.”

She might have been heading for the door so as to open it for him. He only wanted to stay until he’d grasped why he was there. The sight of her striding to the door reminded him that speed was the one advantage she had over him. Pure instinct came to his aid, and all at once he seemed capable of anything. He saw himself opening the nearest cabinet, he felt his finger and thumb slip through the chilly rings of the handles of the scissors, and lunging at her was the completion of these movements. Even then he thought he meant only to drive her away from the door, but he was reckoning without his limp. As he floundered toward her, he lost his balance, and the points of the scissors entered her right leg behind the knee.

She gave an outraged scream and tried to hobble to the door, the scissors wagging in the patch of flesh and blood revealed by the growing hole in the leg of her patterned tights. The next moment she let out a wail so despairing that he almost felt sorry for her, and fell to her knees, well out of reach of the door. As she craned her head over her shoulder to see how badly she was injured, her eyes were the eyes of an animal caught in a trap. She extended one shaky hand to pull out the scissors, but he was too quick for her. “Let me,” he said, taking hold of her thin wrist.

He thought he was going to withdraw the scissors, but as soon as his finger and thumb were through the rings he experienced an overwhelming surge of power which reminded him of how he’d felt as the verdict of the jury was announced. He leaned on the scissors and exerted all the strength he could, and after a while the blades closed with a sound which, though muffled, seemed intensely satisfying.

Either the shock or her struggles and shrieks appeared to have exhausted her. He had time to lower the blinds over the door and windows and to put on one of the plastic aprons which she and her staff must wear. When she saw him returning with the scissors, however, she tried to fight him off while shoving herself with her uninjured leg toward the door. Since he didn’t like her watching him—it was his turn to watch—he stopped her doing so, and screaming. She continued moving for some time after he would have expected her to be incapable of movement, though she obviously didn’t realize that she was retreating from the door. By the time she finally subsided, he had to admit that the game had grown messy and even a little dull.

He washed his hands until they were clean as a baby’s, then he parceled up the apron and the scissors in the wrapping which had contained his present. He let himself out of the shop and limped towards the bus stop, the book under one arm, the tools of his secret under the other. It wasn’t until passersby smiled in response to him that he realised what his expression was, though it didn’t feel like his own smile, any more than he felt personally involved in the incident at the hairdresser’s. Even the memory of all the jurors’ names didn’t feel like his. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t be alone over Christmas, and in future he would try to be less hasty. After all, he and whoever he visited next would have more to discuss.