will roll you not in the luxury you are used to, but in the staleness of sweat and filth and dust and dead flies. Then you will realize the world is not about the City Toy Museum, and your own great glory . . . but she was running on.
‘I can soon get rid of the Director, too. I know quite a lot of things about him, that our trustees don’t know. Things he’s sold at a profit, that he should have kept for the Museum. The affair he had with that little whore in the Dolls’ Department. Oh, they won’t give him time to clear his desk, once I tell them . . .’
How surprised you will be, Hermione, when I leap on you. The incredulity on your face, as I begin to tear your clothes . . . oh, you’ll fight and claw. But I’m strong, strong. I shall enjoy it more if you fight. There will be more chance to hurt you . . .
‘Of course, I shan’t stay long, once they give me the Directorship. Just a couple of years, to make a name. Then I shall go on to America. An exchange visit; meet some big American scholar who wants an affair . . . they’re a randy lot, always trying to touch you up, on the sly, at conferences . . .’
All this time, she was opening doors and shining her torch into empty rooms. Rooms with dirty mattresses thrown askew, with torn half-posters on the walls and the bodies of long-dead rats in corners. Taking no more notice of them than I was.
Oh, Hermione, how I shall explore you! How I shall explore your fear, your pleadings, the delicious point when you at last give up hope.
We had reached the last attic.
‘Nothing here,’ she said, with little interest, automatically. ‘Let’s try the cellars . . .’
I looked from her to the unmade bed . . . but no, it would be better in the cellars; darker, filthier. Somewhere to bury the poor bloody rag of her body, when I was finally done with her.
So, in mock obedience, I began to follow her downstairs again. Could I, could I, when I had reduced her to a bloody rag of a woman, remake her, make her perfect and happy again, so I could tear her to bits all over again? As many times as I wished, till the world’s end. How would her blood taste, on my fingers . . . ?
Somewhere, far away, as we reached the first floor landing again, came three toots of a car-horn. They meant nothing to me. It might have been some pointless lost night-bird calling.
‘Men are pathetic,’ she called back at me, from the bottom stair. ‘Their brains are between their legs. Their whole being is between their legs . . .’
Oh, no, Hermione, foolish Hermione, dead Hermione, my brains are in my fingers too. That’s right, my poor love, go to the cellar door, open it, descend . . .
Again came the three toots of a car-horn. More urgent now. What was there, in the world out there, to be urgent about? Poor pathetic piffling people . . .
At that moment, an alien figure of utter fury leapt on to me. Strong, invincible though I was, he was so much stronger . . . he almost picked me up bodily, and carried me to the back door. Threw me down the back steps, shouting meaningless gibberish.
‘Run, you silly effer, run!’
I landed painfully on my knees. Suddenly, I was Morgan again: little, hurting, and quite terrified of being caught by the police. I leapt to my feet, stared around me wildly.
The flying figure in a white raincoat cannoned into me and we both fell down again. A dark figure with a briefcase in its hand took off like a rocket down the wilderness of the back garden. Dickie, as if all the devils in hell were after him.
‘Run, Morgan, run.’ It was Hermione’s ordinary voice; she sounded as terrified of being caught by the police as I was. We got up and blundered down the dark obstacles of the garden. I held my hands as a stirrup for her foot, and almost threw her over the garden wall. Then we were running for the cover of the Park trees . . .
‘I would have thought, Mr Morgan,’ said Sergeant Crittenden heavily, ‘that if you two had wanted to go in for that kind of thing, you would have