Free The Unblemished by Conrad Williams Page A

to him, specifically to him, expressing his admiration for his
crimes and wishing to meet him face to face.
    'Why?' he had mouthed, unable to summon a squeak of sound
when he stood before the great man for the first time.
    'Do you know what it is like to float in a bath of blood?' Salavaria
had whispered in reply. 'To sleep in a bed with corpses that cannot
close their eyes? Do you know the feeling, when you take something
as incontrovertibly positive as life and turn it, with your own hands,
against everything that is outlined in its code, to oppose what nature
intended?'
    Ostensibly this was no longer the man who had torn an unborn
child from the womb of Emily Tasker and partially devoured its face
while the mother haemorrhaged to death. His withdrawal from the
game had apparently ruined him, left a husk that was so fragile it
would be blown away by the breeze. But Manser never bought that.
He saw Salavaria's strength. The body might seem to have dwindled,
but there was sinew there, and force, and the brains and blood that
powered it were stronger than ever.
    Today though, he could see that something was seriously wrong.
Salavaria was sitting in a steel chair fastened to the floor with rusting
bolts. His chin rested against his chest, his grey hair tumbling
forwards. He appeared exhausted. He seemed to have shrunk inside
his clothes. Manser wondered if there was an illness he had not been
told about. He wondered if guilt had come charging into this
vulnerable body, after all this time, and had finally broken him. He
couldn't believe that.
    Manser waited. He had cleared his throat, said hello, the first time
he had visited and had not been acknowledged for another five
minutes. Salavaria knew he was here. And Manser, after all, was no
stranger to waiting.
    Thirty years on, still, with some frequency, the bones of his crimes
were picked over by the carrion eaters who published the red tops
every morning. There was a regular froth over the fact that he had
escaped arrest for so long, usually when a new editor was appointed.
Or the flames of fear were fanned with an article on the most
dangerous men in the UK still at large. Salavaria – or rather, because
they did not know his real name, The Picnic Man – featured prominently
in those. Some ventured that he must have died; it was the only
answer for the sudden end to the sequence of killing. Some said that
if he was still at large, then he must be a harmless old man now,
whose reputation was being stoked by lurid journalists.
    But a new generation was unmoved by his crimes, despite the
tabloids' sanctimonious outrage. Salavaria was old school. He was
slowly being forgotten.
    'I smell lunch,' Salavaria said. His voice had never lost its
Romanian accent, the slashed vowels, the unusual intonation, the
unexpected pauses and stresses. Perhaps because nobody ever spoke
to him. He had chosen this life of voluntary solitary confinement; it
made for a dull existence if you liked to converse. Salavaria did not
seem to mind. He had books, a radio, and these had kept him sane.
If, Manser reasoned, you could call someone sane who carried slices
of thymus around in peach paper on the off chance he grew peckish.
But then, who was Manser to cast judgement on sanity? He
chuckled lightly to himself; Salavaria raised his head. His eyes were
the palest green, like the iridescent flash of mould on a shaving of
ham. When they favoured you, it felt like you were slowly being
reamed out. Thick white eyebrows beetled at the slightest change of
expression. His face appeared sucked in, as if something had
deflated him, but the skeletal appearance was offset by the shining
beauty of his skin. It was elastic, uncreased, as smooth and
colourful as that of someone half his age.
    'You find something funny?'
    'Not really,' Manser replied. 'Just my twisted mind.'
    'Your twisted mind is what I rely upon,' Salavaria said. 'Don't ever
attempt to straighten it out.' Salavaria winked at Manser, who again
felt a