Prey

‘Fear is sharp-sighted’

Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Don Quixote’

PART ONE

April 1941

ONE

The clack-clack sound of the young woman’s heels on the pavement cut sharply back into the night as the last wail of the warning siren died away, restoring an uneasy quiet. Early evening cloud had dangled a hint of a promise of respite from bombings and she had been craving a four-inch bath followed by a dance-blistered feet-up, but plainly the blasted, sodding enemy had other ideas, so now she was hurrying up Haverstock Hill in the hateful impenetrable darkness of blackout, the air still stinking from the last raid, her next-to-useless tissue-covered torch pointed down at her feet, her eyes trying to stay fixed on the white-painted line that marked the pavement’s edge, hoping like bloody billy-o to reach home before the raid began.

Not that home was safe these days, but she couldn’t bear the shelters, had thought she was going to suffocate the one time she’d tried squeezing in on a platform at Kings Cross. She was a sociable type, Lord knew, but it had been no party down there; it had smelled disgusting and sounded even worse, full of snores and farting and babies crying, and worse, there’d been insects, even mosquitoes – in London – and she’d been bitten to shreds and not slept a single wink, and she’d determined that it was simply not a place fit for dying. So tonight, as soon as she got home, she was going to duck under her very own and private kitchen table and just take her chances of being a sitting duck if a bomb did have her name on it and, frankly, anything seemed better right now than being out all alone in this bloody awful pitch-darkness.

She loathed the blackout, had needed a night light as a little kid in Dungeness and had never really grown out of it. So the brightness of city life had been one of the many things she’d loved about moving to London – until this ghastly war had come along and snuffed all the lights out.

A new sound startled her.

Sounds, more like, from somewhere behind her.

Weird, grating, creaking, rasping sounds, a bit like teeth grinding, but magnified. Rhythmic, too, and really creepy. Grate, creak, squeal. Over and over.

She stopped for a second, turned, saw nothing but blackness. Started walking again, even more quickly now, the sounds still trailing her.

Pursuing her, she felt.

She told herself not to be an idiot, but kept hurrying, risked casting another look back over her shoulder, saw a shape now, coming closer – someone pushing something, she thought – saw what it was, something ordinary enough that ought not to have scared her at all. But it did, it really did, made the hairs on the back of her neck and even her nipples stand right out, chilled her deep inside, and an involuntary moan of fear escaped her and she stopped hurrying and began to run.

Oh dear God, help me, she prayed silently, her breath coming in gasps as her heels clattered on the pavement, and she still didn’t comprehend why she felt so terrified because this was not a bomb or a mine or gas or even a Nazi, but she knew, she just knew that this was something even worse, coming closer …

Her right shoe collided with a broken bit of stone and she stumbled, fought to stay upright, lost and fell down hard.

The grating, creaking, squealing thing stopped. Right behind her.

‘Oh dear,’ a voice said. ‘Oh dearie dear.’

She scrambled to get up, heart hammering, the icy sensation of terror filling her whole body now.

Her left heel caught on the hem of her coat.

‘Let me help you,’ the voice said.

‘I’m all right,’ she said shakily.

‘Course you are,’ the voice said.

The raid began, some distance away, ack-ack first from the battery up on Primrose Hill, shells bursting in the sky, searchlights seeking the bombers, criss-crossing, then the first strike, the first explosion, defence and attack combining, deafening, shaking the earth.

Obliterating those other, much smaller sounds of terror and violent assault on another Hampstead hill, but bringing enough spasmodic flashes of light to illuminate the spectre of the young woman being dragged over the pavement and into a side road by her slim ankles.

Blood ran in a dark rivulet through her red hair and over her forehead, rolled down one cheek and over her pretty, youthful jawline, her attacker grunting with effort; and another bomb exploded, closer this time, and on the horizon fires glowed from earth to sky.

For a moment there was only the ack-ack, and then …

Grate, creak, squeal.

And the hideous orchestra of the air raid started up again.

TWO

He had been on an errand in Bloomsbury, had been walking back to Goodge Street Station, passing the jagged, hideous, blackened cavities and bombsites of Tottenham Court Road, when he’d caught his first glimpse of her.

A young woman in a particularly eye-catching coat – quite a decent garment for these times, oversized checks of black and red wool sewn together almost like patchwork, the coat cut for some other female, too big for this one but with a pleasing swing to it as she moved, jauntily and entirely oblivious of him.

It was her hair, of course, that had marked her out. Like red tulips bathed in sunlight even on a cloudy early evening.

He had held back, waiting to see where she went, had tried to fix his eyes on the top of her crimson head as a small crowd threatened to swallow her up, had spied one of the bold checks instead, had hastened then so as not to lose her.

She had walked into the station and his heart rate had sped up, adrenaline surging, though he knew she might yet be travelling south, had restrained himself again as she’d approached the lift, had let a layer of passengers step in ahead of him before entering, and they had shifted for him considerately, waiting for the gates to close, and then, as they had begun their noisy descent, he had maintained a downward gaze, not permitting himself a better view of his new target.

His quarry, he now felt certain, his pulses racing.

After that, there had been more waiting on the platform, and then boarding. But the delay had not mattered to him by then, for she had been going north.

His prey.

Going his way.

The hair was duller now – now that he had her – brought to life again by the patchy moonlight and searing flashes of explosion, and then, in the pinkish glow of distant fires, there were ripples of Rita Hayworth. All extinguished again by darkness as the two of them went on their way.

Grate, creak, squeal.

The blackout his dear friend, he often thought, folding him into itself, devouring him, rendering him invisible.

Life felt excellent in rare moments such as these. It had not always been so, had been worse than hard. Worse than most people could begin to imagine.

He was owed so much.

Taking his due now, finally, and Christ knew he’d earned it.

A cloud covered the moon, then shifted west, beams stroking the hair.

His, soon.

‘Be there soon, dearie dear,’ he said softly.

THREE

Alfred Ashcroft had been born in 1902 while his father, Ronald, a serving British army corporal fighting in the second Boer War, lay wounded in a hospital far from home. By the time the soldier returned to their somewhat shabby flat near Camden Town, he was, like many others, a physically and psychologically damaged man with intense anger issues.

It had been just mother and son till then. Lilian Ashcroft had been a beautiful woman with glorious, long, flame-coloured hair, and as a young child Alfred had loved stroking it, adored it especially when she bent over him and let the silken strands caress his cheeks. As he grew a little older, she allowed him to stand on a stool beside her dressing table and brush it, but once Ronald was home everything changed. Father resented his son’s close relationship with his mother, mocked when he saw Alfred brushing or plaiting Lilian’s hair, denigrated him, shouted at his wife for permitting it, called her perverted, called the boy a freak. He beat Lilian regularly and viciously and made her life – and their son’s – a misery.

In 1912, when Alfred was ten, Lilian hanged herself and Ronald shot himself through the mouth. The boy found them, experienced pure gladness that their tormentor was dead; felt terrible numbness as he stood on a chair, carving through the washing line that had gouged deep into Lilian’s lovely neck. He was not aware at the time of truly thinking about how this tragedy had come to pass. He only felt the weight of her still warm body as he lowered her, almost dropping her, to the floor. He did not even glance back at his father, had seen enough of that ghastly, hideous destruction to stay with him forever. He cradled his beloved mother for a long time, then took a pillow from the bed she had shared with the monster, rested her head on it and went in search of two things: the wedding photograph that stood on a shelf in the sitting room and a pair of scissors from the kitchen. He removed the photograph from its frame and carefully cut his father out of the picture, realizing for the first time as the blades sliced through the paper what his mind had been too deadened to consider before: that his mother had not done that to herself, would never have done that to him, would not have left the son she so loved; that the brute must have done it to her and then shot himself.

‘Bastard!’ Alfred had sobbed, had closed the blades of the scissors and turned them into a dagger, stabbing his father’s image over and over, cutting his own fingers, heedless of pain or his own blood. ‘You dirty, evil bastard.’

He heard knocking then, at their front door, froze, waiting until it stopped and the sound of footsteps faded.

He looked down at the photograph, at his mother, severed at last from the devil who had destroyed her, had wrecked their lives, hers and his, twice over, once when he’d come back from war, and again now. She’d looked dignified in her simple wedding dress, but the black-and-white photograph didn’t do her justice, and there was nothing now left of her true physical beauty except that glorious hair. So he went back to the bedroom, knelt beside her and, very carefully and tenderly, he cut off her thick, still shining plait, carried it to his room and hid it, knowing that someone would come soon, and if anyone found out, they would ridicule him or call him wicked as he had often done.

‘He did it,’ he told one of the policemen who came because a neighbour had heard the shot and gone to call them.

‘My father,’ he said, saw the busybody neighbour hovering behind them, goggle-eyed. He was icily clear about what he was saying, because whether his mother had put that washing line around her own neck or whether his father had done it to her, either way he was a murderer.

The ambulance was a new motor vehicle, for they had been horse-drawn till recently, but Alfred wished that his mother could have been taken away by beautiful horses – though his father could go straight to hell in a dustbin so far as he was concerned.

‘He did it,’ he told the policeman again.

‘We know,’ the man said kindly.

‘I mean he did that to my mother,’ Alfred insisted.

He went on telling everyone who would listen, or pretend to listen, over the next days and weeks, but no one paid any attention. They told him there was no doubt that Lilian had committed suicide, that sadly both his parents had died by their own hand, that the husband had plainly shot himself out of grief. Alfred did his best to explain what Ronald had been like, said that they must have seen the bruises on his mother’s face and arms, but then he gave up arguing because she had been buried by then – beside him, which seemed the wickedest thing of all – but whatever they said, he still knew without a shred of doubt that even if his mother had hanged herself – which he still doubted, would always doubt – she would only have done it to escape the cruelty. His father had been the beast who had driven her to it, and though Alfred was glad that the army pistol had blown the corpor-al’s face to bloody mincemeat, he also believed with all his heart that instant death was far better than he deserved.

From then on, yearning despairingly to see his mother again, he became obsessed whenever he saw a red-haired woman, though it was never the right shade of red, never the colour of flame. He wanted, needed to touch Lilian’s hair again, to stroke his own face with it, close his eyes, make-believe that she was with him again. When he knew he was alone and it was safe, he took out the plaited hair and held it close to his face, breathed in the remnants of her scent, kissed it reverently and felt just a little comforted.

He was sent to live with foster parents in Palmers Green: a chemist and his teacher wife, who were both very busy but kind to him, and Alfred did well at school, found that he liked escaping into learning and seldom got into trouble, until he befriended a red-headed boy whose mother had hair of almost the right shade. He wangled an invitation to the other boy’s home, but the mother quickly became unsettled because Alfred kept staring at her, and then, after tea, when he asked to visit the bathroom, the curious lady followed him, caught him removing strands of her hair from a brush and told him to leave, reported his behaviour to the school and to his foster parents. Denounced for unacceptable conduct and humiliated, Alfred cut himself off emotionally, focused only on work, but in 1914, with the school leaving age being twelve and his foster father leaving to fight for their country, his education was cut off.

His foster father wrote to him, asked him to take good care of his wife and to always remember to be useful to her. So young Alfred helped around the house, dug the beds in their garden and planted vegetables as his war effort task and pleaded with his foster mother – who was volunteering at the local hospital and knitting for the troops – to teach him in her spare time. She was glad to oblige, observed with satisfaction his growing adeptness with mathematics and his hunger for delving into her husband’s old textbooks, and a closeness grew between them. Until, while she was visiting a primary school in Poplar in June of 1917, she was killed in a daylight air raid. Alfred Ashcroft would have been entirely alone then but for a friend of his foster mother’s, another teacher who promised him a home until his foster father returned from the war, encouraging him to continue with his studies, moved by the boy’s earnest wish to follow in his footsteps as a chemist.

His foster father did come home, but succumbed to Spanish flu soon after, despite young Alfred’s efforts to nurse him back to health. Aged sixteen, with the backing of his unofficial adoptive mother, he went back to school, buried himself in his till-then fragmented education, excelled at chemistry and physics, moved on to train as a pharmacy dispenser, passed the examinations – and finally, a young man without friends or any wish for a social life, he opened his own pharmacy in Kentish Town.

His mother, he thought, would have been proud of him.

FOUR

For Harriet Yorke, it began in the spring of 1941, seven months after the start of the London Blitz, during one of her nightly walks with George, her small Cairn terrier, the outings frowned upon by Louisa, Felix and Jack, her tenants and dear friends, who all worried about her venturing out after blackout but were also almost resigned to her blithely ignoring them.

‘George’s bladder doesn’t care about rules,’ she had told them more than once. ‘And you know he won’t go in the garden.’

George had been stung once, by a bee, and held the lilies responsible, whether in bloom or not, which reassured Harriet since she knew that not only were calla lilies – for which their house was named – not actual lilies at all, but they were also highly toxic. And walking was good for her, too, she told her friends.

‘Not in a raid,’ Felix had said darkly, in his heavily-accented English.

More complaints during her Thursday night walk – just after the All Clear had sounded – from Mr Bilton, the local Air Raid Precautions warden who had loomed out of the darkness and sighed pointedly as he saw that Harriet had left her gas mask at home again, then looked sternly down at George.

‘I know, Mr Bilton, he’s still not evacuated,’ Harriet had said. ‘And I’m awfully sorry about the mask, and I absolutely promise to remember it next time.’

‘You’re WVS, Miss Yorke, so you know better than most how bad it’s been. We could get another packet any time.’

The warden was right, of course, she knew that, and he was doubly correct, considering that she did volunteer for the Women’s Voluntary Service and was therefore involved in all sorts relating to the often nightly raids. This evening she had been off-duty and had spent the raid in the basement of Calla House, but she was certain it must have been nothing short of nightmarish for thousands of Londoners who’d been far less lucky, and coming upstairs after the All Clear, they had all rather shakily counted their blessings.

She had apologized again to Mr Bilton, then walked on more briskly, her masked torch pointed downward, along the pitch-black, white-kerbed avenue, until a strange and rather ugly sound halted her and the dog in their tracks.

Something like a vixen’s scream, but more muffled.

She listened for another moment, then walked on, stopping at regular intervals for George’s tree inspections before turning back.

‘Just one more stop,’ she told the dog, ‘then home.’

He had been about to oblige her near Glenilla Road when they heard another sound, an odd rasping or rather screeching, something like old lift gates in need of oil, quieter but repeating, on and on.

Harriet peered into the dark and saw the silhouette of a man in a hat and coat walking towards her from the side road, pushing a wheelchair which was clearly the source of the sounds.

George growled.

There was a person in the wheelchair, Harriet saw as the man came closer, slumped beneath a blanket – a woman, she thought from the shape, though the face was obscured by a shawl.

A front wheel of the chair struck a broken paving stone and it veered a little off-course, the man cursing under his breath.

‘Need some help?’ Harriet offered.

‘No, thank you.’ He pushed harder at the chair, but the wheel was caught, and instinctively Harriet moved forward to assist.

‘We’re fine.’ The man sounded brusque, then added, more politely, ‘She enjoys her little outings.’

Harriet smiled towards the chair’s invisible occupant.

The man gave a more energetic shove and the chair surmounted the jagged paving stone