It's a scene that has become a part of our shared unconscious, along with the endless speculation about the second rifleman, because we have all seen the footage so many times — that shaky home-movie, caught by a tourist, that zoomed in on her expression just as she looked up in agonised realisation to the roof of the bank, and wailed her final two syllables: 'Jubal!' Mrs Bligh-Jones wailing to her demon lover. And then, seconds after, the man emerging from the door of the National Westminster bank, that man with a hump who slipped through the crowds towards the sea having first shouted the words 'I saw him! It was a ventriloquist!' The mob surged up Great Darkgate Street, towards the ghetto, with fury in their hearts. While down on the Prom I ran first down Terrace Road towards the sound, until the crowds told me what had happened. All the while I had been wondering about the identity of the Raven, and now I had my answer. The Raven who like a spider devours his mate, the lover who kills his beloved. It had to be Jubal. When the penny dropped, I spun round in the street and ran the other way, down the Prom, towards the Excelsior Hotel.
He was sitting over in the bay window, the curtains closed, the room in darkness, holding his head in his hands and moaning. The thin blade of light from the gap in the curtains was filled with dancing dust like the beam of a projector and pierced my vision like a sword. I walked gingerly across a sticky carpet and stood before him. Slowly he raised his head and stared at me, his eyes like dark pools in a forest, his unwashed body emitting a thick reek of aftershave and excrement that made my hand fly to my mouth. Somewhere, lost in the gloom of the room, a gramophone played a song, the squeaky, almost Oriental ting-tong sound of a Kurt Weill opera from the thirties. I listened to the high, ethereal notes, 'Oh moon of Alabama, we now must say goodbye.' I flung the curtains brutally back and Jubal recoiled like a vampire before the light. The room was a pigsty. A sea of overflowing cigarette butts flowed out across the tabletops, candles and three-day-old room-service food.
He was wearing a bathrobe but didn't smell like he'd been near a bath in a long time. In his hand he held a book of verse and on his wrists were bandages from which oozed a dark moist fluid the colour of cherries.
Silently he pointed to a chair and I drew it up and sat opposite him in the window.
'I knew you would come,' he whispered.
Oh moon of Alabama, we now must say goodbye ...
'What have you done to your wrists?'
He turned his palms upwards as if showing off a new set of cuff-links.
'I opened the veins about an hour ago.'
We've lost our good old mama, and must have whisky, oh you know why ...
A cold shiver slithered up through my innards. That same shiver all decent people feel when they walk down the street past a doorway where there's been a fight and they see spots of blood or even teeth. Or when you drive past an accident and catch a half-glimpse in the corner of your eye of something red that had once been a man.
'Did you change your mind?' I asked like an idiot. Did he change his mind? What a stupid thing to say.
He shook his head wearily. 'No, it's an old Roman trick, described by Petronius, I think. You open the veins and then you bandage them so you die slowly and peacefully. The custom was for those for whom no hope remained to pre-empt the vengeance of the courts and choose their own time of dying. One last night, a few hours to bid adieu. To dine, to take a last skin of wine, to listen to some poetry and perhaps amuse oneself with the slave boys. Such is the custom for the last night. But alas in Aberystwyth the choice of entertainments is ... is ... well, you can imagine it.'
'Should ... should I call an ambulance?'
'I would be grateful if you didn't.' And then with a slight twist of his head, 'Would you be so kind as to fetch me a drink?'
I went over to the drinks cabinet. And as I did he recited from the book in his hand.
'Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden ...'
Most of the bottles were empty but there was some sherry left. I poured us a couple and handed him one. He took a sip and closed the book. 'You know what he said, don't you?'
'Who?'
'Petronius. "The pleasure of the act of love is gross and brief and brings loathing after it."'
I said, 'You don't look like a Raven.'
'You think they would send a disco-dancer to ensnare Mrs Bligh-Jones? She needs to be wooed like any other woman. Or flattered.'
'Or offered a part in a movie.'
He nodded. 'Yes, that one always works well.' He put the book down by his feet and picked up a discarded shoe. It was a dancing-shoe.
'But it is not the best way ... not the best.' He traced his finger along the contours of the sole and pressed his eyes tightly shut as if stabbed by a shard of memory. When he opened the lids again, they were heavy with wetness. He held the shoe out towards me. 'This is the best, my friend. To dance! Ah! Yes, to dance all night until the skylight fills with the milk rose of dawn ... if you can do it well, with йlan and ... gentillesse, ah! it is ... is ... voodoo itself! I learned this when I was just twenty-one, apprenticed to the Pier Ballroom to partner the rich widows who came on holiday but had no beau. A penny a dance they gave me. Such wonderful times, such deep joy ... I cannot speak now of ... of ... what does the poet say? Glory of youth glowed in his souclass="underline" Where is that glory now?'
He paused and gave the shoe in his hand a wan look; then placed it down by his foot as gently as if it were a sleeping infant.
'They closed them, you know. Closed them all, those wonderful glittering ballrooms. The people had no use any more for sophistication, or elegance, or courtly manners. They wanted rock and roll, and television and bingo. I was left with nothing but my shoes. And one other thing, a thing that every man in this world craves, but very few ever truly possess: the knowledge of how to please a lady. The people who recruited me for the Ravens understood this.'
'But you used it to kill Mrs Bligh-Jones.'
His features hardened. 'Spare me the catcalls, Mister Knight. You dishonour my death-bed.'
'I'd like to know why you killed her.'
'Because my orders told me to of course. Because I am a Raven, it is my job. Do you ask the postman why he bears bad news?'
'Yes but why did she have to die?'
'Why do any of us have to die? The important thing is that we all do and the various reasons are of little consequence when set against such an implacable fact.'
'You killed her because of some corny piece of philosophy?'
'No I killed her, if you must know, because her methods had become unsound. Brilliant, but unsound.'
'You mean Pumlumon?'
He nodded.
'So it's true then? My God. My God!'
Jubal threw the book to one side. 'Personally, I do not share the general revulsion. To me what happened on Pumlumon was nothing, just a piece of routine cannibalism —'
I gasped.
'I'm at a loss to understand such fastidiousness in the face of death. In a situation such as this, a matter of survival, such things arc accepted. The literature of nineteenth-century seafarers is full of references to the practice. After sodomy it was the greatest occupational hazard a cabin-boy had to fear. Seafaring folk understand these things, but the city people get jittery. It is the one crime they do not forgive. And thus she had to die; thus once she had embarked on that road, the order, the inevitable order came: Terminate Mrs Bligh-Jones's command -with extreme prejudice.'
'And yet you were her lover?'
'How else does one ensnare the heart of one's victim? Oh I admit that it was not without its pleasurable side. Mrs Bligh-Jones is a fine woman. A feisty woman, with passion and scalding-hot fire in her veins. I found much to admire in her. That clean, sharp purity of vision, that exquisite mixture of beauty and cruelty and ... and ... and certainty. Yes that was what I most admired. A woman of action, a woman unfettered by doubt who could eat her bowling partner of twenty years because she knew there was no other way ...'