Brond was kneeling in front of a woman. He was naked but he still had on his shoes and black socks. I think the idea must have been that this would be humiliating. He was holding up to her a long tube or series of tubes, tapered at one end and with a thick handle at the other.
‘It’s an electric prod,’ the girl’s voice said beside me. ‘They use it on cattle.’
He was showing the woman something on the handle. It might have been a ratchet he turned. I saw his mouth moving but no sound came to us. The woman took the tube from him and laid the end of it between his legs. Suddenly his body convulsed and jerked away. The woman beckoned him back into place. He shuffled forward and she laid the tube again in the same place and nothing happened and then his body jerked away for the second time. The woman stood unmoving and made the same beckoning gesture, but he hesitated. She stood with the tube in her hands and said something and she looked at the handle and made some kind of adjustment.
I felt a hand on my back and the girl ran it down and rubbed against me. Her warm breath tickled my ear.
‘You can put it to different settings,’ she said. ‘She’s giving it more power.’
This time when the prod touched him his body was thrown back, but when she gestured him forward he came at once. When he had reached his former place, she stepped back and he had to approach her again, but again she went back two or three paces. As he crept nearer, she made the same movements as before on the handle.
‘My God,’ the girl said, ‘she’s going to give him more.’
It should have been marvellous to feel unafraid of Brond for the first time. It should have been marvellous to catch her smell mingled with my own like the sharp tang of citrus fruit; it should have been marvellous to think how healthy we were and how natural as we stood there watching.
At last she laid the prod against him and his body did jerk and shudder but his instinctive movement was so immediate that it must hardly have touched him. That seemed to anger her and she tugged him by the hair to his feet and set him with his face against the wall.
‘He won’t be able to get away from it there,’ the girl beside me said. ‘Christ, she’s giving it more. If she gives it full power, she’ll destroy him.’
Brond stood with his arms at his sides so that his forehead and the palms of his hands were against the wall. He opened his legs and the tip of the prod went into his body in the passage between his buttocks. His hands flew up in clenched fists and his spine arched impossibly and then he crashed to the floor; his heavy body writhed like a cut worm and with a final shuddering of the legs lay still. Too still. The woman backed away with both hands over her mouth. There was no way for us to know what kind of noises she might be making.
‘Oh, God,’ the girl whispered. ‘Look.’
The head of the corpse was slowly raised from the floor. Then Brond stood up. He was naked and in those ridiculous shoes with the black stockings wrinkled round his ankles; and he looked as terrible and as frightening as on the first day I had seen him. He gathered up his clothes and began to put them on and he must have said something to the woman for, as he was dressing, she stripped. She was not a young woman and her flesh sagged and hung on her like strips of soiled dough. Her face was half crazed. When he picked up the prod from where she had dropped it, she stood with her face against the wall but he must have told her to turn round. The hair between her legs was grey and he put the prod there and she bent with the pain of its entry. Although the woman’s body winced in expectation, nothing happened. As the prod slid free and nudged the nipple of each breast in turn, her head hung watching in helpless confusion.
‘It’s a fake,’ the girl said. ‘There’s no charge in it at all.’
He slapped the woman as if angered and her head flew back and struck the wall, and at that he seemed to lose all control. As he caught her by the throat, she might have been screaming. Before his shoulder hid her, I saw her tongue stretched forward and the spittle fly out of her open mouth. The girl’s hand rubbed at the base of my spine.
‘He’ll kill her,’ I sobbed. ‘He’s killing her.’
I saw her die. With his hands about her throat he laid her down on the floor and then put out the lights one by one. At the door, he looked back at her lying by the wall and then he had put up the last switch and it was dark.
‘Kiss me!’
The voice whispered at me.
‘Where’s the light? The light. We need the light.’
I tried to push her away. She pressed against me and then I felt her tongue lick my face.
‘Get away!’
I lurched from her and fell against the bed. When I found the lamp and lit it, she was gone.
In the empty corridor I stood listening. It was a very quiet house. The carpet was thick under my feet although it was dirty and unswept. On the wall between two doors there was a brass gong, figured with elephants and a procession of Indians dancing. I put out a finger and touched the tiny ecstatic figures as if to make sure that something in this world was real.
‘Birds in their little nests agree,’ Brond chanted almost in my ear, he had approached so silently.
My heart thundered in fright.
‘I saw you.’
He sketched surprise.
‘I’ve seen you kill twice now.’
‘Yes?’
‘On the bridge.’ I was full of hatred for him. What a fool he must think I was! ‘And the woman just now.’
‘Mrs Kennedy? She seemed well enough when I had a look at her.’
‘Jackie? What’s Jackie to do— Don’t despise me. I despise you. I saw you—’ it was surprisingly hard to put into words to a man like him, ‘begging and being— and being— I don’t know how you could do that.’
He made a little humming noise; incredibly he seemed pleased.
‘It really did seem extraordinary to you? Not the impression I make at all . . .’
‘I think you must be mad.’
He clicked his tongue disapprovingly.
‘Oh, come now. It’s not so bad as that. I imagine the country’s full of clergymen and retired lieutenant-colonels and bus conductors all doing or daydreaming along roughly similar lines.’
‘You killed her.’
I became conscious that he was speaking normally while I was furiously whispering as if the fear of discovery were mine alone.
‘We’ve a busy night ahead of us,’ he said, ‘but let’s spare a moment. Come along!’
He crooked his finger and I followed him like a schoolboy. The big front room had people in it now, two or three groups of them, and a piano was being played softly and some of the girls were handing out drinks. It might have been the party at the University earlier. The only differences at a first glance were that the girls were younger, the men rather older and looking conspicuously more successful.
‘Recognise anyone?’ Brond asked.
Before I could answer, we were approached by the bouncy silver-haired little man who had come with us into the house; smaller than Brond, he did not come up to my shoulder.
‘She let you stay then,’ he said jocularly.
‘Thanks to your good influence,’ Brond said.
‘Ah, influence.’ He seemed to be at the stage of drink where one mood passed easily into its opposite for now he became solemn. ‘I suppose we’re both exerting as much of that as we can – not that anything seems able to help much. Dear old William Roughhead’s world of Pritchard and Slater and Jessie McLachlan is very small beer now. Endless vandalism. Crimes against the person . . . There’s a rot in the body social. What? Oh, it’s you.’
One of the girls had brushed her fingers, decorously, along the back of his neck and he followed, head bobbing like a lecherous sparrow.
‘I doubt if a reporter,’ Brond said watching him go, ‘or a blackmailer would last long if he interfered with these nice people.’
And he smiled benevolently on the room like a widdershins archbishop.