She might have dismissed the water bottle as something left by a passer-by. It might have caused her to complain about people being sloppy and uncaring, but the petals, I would imagine, perplexed her. The inexplicable will cause anxiety. I don’t want to frighten her too much – at least, not yet. For now, it’s a bit like stepping into another person’s life with the ability to make alterations along the way.
I have my own woman in the shadows, waiting for her time to pounce. She warns me not to get too confident and relishes my mistakes. She would have got a nice kick out of the failed Rick affair. At times I call my hunched shadow ‘the witch’. She reared me, but she wasn’t my mother. My real mother died in childbirth, aged fifteen. For a long time, I thought my life had taken hers. It isn’t easy, believing your first breaths in this world killed another – especially when she was the person who gave you your life. It sets you up for being different. I discovered later that most of what I had been told was a lie. It wasn’t me who killed her. She’d died because of abandonment, and because the woman in the shadows wanted it to be that way.
I never knew my mother, but part of me believed that she would be pleased if I killed the witch. I had thought the witch’s death would end her control. I was wrong. It gave her cruelty greater power. I still remember her laughing in my face, telling me about burning my mother’s body, calling her a whore, saying she was desperate for it, like some wild boar. I’m not looking for your sympathy. I understand the pleasures of the witch, and I know now she will never leave me. She will always be close by – my darkest shadow.
There are some things I have in common with my new lover’s wife, one being that I cannot conceive either. Once I had a notion of having a child. I tried to visualise what they would look like. Would they have my hair, eye colouring, my high forehead? I suppose my lover’s wife asked those questions too, but that is where our similarities end. I cannot comprehend her life, and she cannot envisage mine. I’m the one having sex with her husband, the one allowing him to do the things he wants to do, things she cannot contemplate. She is alien to me, and soon she will be alien to him.
The important thing about those who live ordinary lives is that they rarely think outside the box. They feel safe, and in their safety, they are most at risk. Would you warn her if you could? Or would you wait around to see what other games I have in store? Fear is a powerful thing, you must agree. Fear is like the eye of the camera: it obscures things. You will need to remember that point. It might prove to be important later.
REGINALD STREET, THE LIBERTIES
ALTHOUGH O’CONNOR WASN’T due back in work until the following day, his mind slotted into investigator mode when Kate mentioned the Parisian killing. ‘This case, nine years ago,’ his voice was animated, ‘what are the similarities to Rick Shevlin’s killing?’
‘We have another male victim, Pierre Laurent, this time in his mid-twenties. He had a link to the art world – a student specialising in fine art. The body was also found in a hotel room. Again there were knife injuries, but that’s not all.’
‘Don’t tell me he was laid out the same way as Shevlin?’
‘The body was positioned differently. According to Mark Lynch, he was wearing a hooded robe.’
‘So?’ O’Connor seemed sceptical.
‘The Parisian police initially thought the killing had religious inferences, the victim being dressed as a monk, but they also considered an association with the Tarot, the Hermit card in particular. It didn’t lead them anywhere, but it was that link to the Tarot, and the belief on the part of the French police, albeit tentative, that the killer was female that has sparked Mark’s interest about a connection between that case and the current murder.’
‘Lynch did well, although not without your help. What else did he tell you about the Parisian investigation?’
‘There was a candlelit lantern on a side table beside the victim’s body. It didn’t belong to the hotel, so it’s likely the killer placed it there, especially if they were replicating the card.’
‘And its meaning?’
‘It’s interpreted as a time of introspection, an inner search or reflection. If this is the same killer, it creates a pattern. We could have two cards within an overall spread. The difficulty is less about interpreting the individual cards, and more about working out what the overall spread looks like. The murder of Pierre Laurent happened nine years ago. That’s a long time for a killer to be inactive. But the use of the cards may be her way of telling us she’s on some kind of journey.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Tarot is seen as reflective of a life path. Everything is viewed within the context of your past, how it forms the person you are in the present, and moving on from there, the current mind-set and future of the Querent—’
‘The Querent?’ He sounded slightly baffled.
‘The person who seeks the reading from the cards. The current mind-set is what the Querent believes will happen next versus what the cards predict, which can be contradictory.’
‘I don’t get you.’