Free Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Frank Baker Page B

have been destroyed. If you remember, the Cassenden case – six years ago. I was in charge of that. A sex-killer – and we have our own names for them just as, I daresay, Mr Patch, you had your own names in the Post Office business?’
    I could only nod. And let him go on.
    ‘We got him, perhaps you remember, on one murder only. Please believe me, I never talk about such matters. But now I have to. The girl – she was only nineteen – was dismembered. The dismembered body was found in Wyre Forest. The sack – ’ And I remember that here he hesitated, and at that moment I could hear his sister, the other side of the door. But she did not come in, and I guessed she was listening. ‘The sack contained the remains.’
    ‘Why did you throw it to me?’ I almost shouted at him. And Mr Knowles looked at me gravely.
    ‘I don’t know.’ That was all he said. Then a pause, and that sister still shuffling, the other side of the door. And Mr Knowles went on: ‘I had to get rid of it somehow. It – ’ And here there was a long silence. ‘ – Gave me a bit of trouble.’
    ‘But surely – ’ I protested, ‘surely – such gruesome relics – you didn’t usually keep such things?’
    ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘No. We don’t. But in this case – and I was a long time on it, if you remember – in this case, I asked finally if I could keep the sack. It was a symbol of a sort of victory for me.’ Then again, a silence, until he added, ‘I always regret I did keep it.’
    ‘So the sack contained – ?’ I began a question I could not finish. But Mr Knowles finished it for me.
    ‘It contained – the legs, the arms, the abdomen, part of the neck. But it did not contain – ’
    I ran out of his house, before the sister could bring the coffee. But as I slammed his door I heard her speaking angrily to him.
    ‘You fool. Why did you have to tell him?’
    I didn’t wait to hear more. This was yesterday. And now . . . now . . .
    I wish I weren’t alone in this place. I sit here snug and warm with the electric heater on in this little breakfast-room. Both doors, to the hall and to the scullery, are closed. It is October, and I hear the rustle of dead leaves outside on a cold, clear night, without wind. The white rose is dead. I’ve neglected it, I’ve neglected everything.
    I think I’d better light the fire, save electricity. But if I do it’ll mean going to the outhouse to get more coal. Still, if I lit it, and let it die, and saw only ash, white ash like the white rose, I might feel better. I feel, so strangely, my innocence upon me – and what do I mean by that? I mean that I would like to go back to my earliest days, before I knew right from wrong.
    I must get up from this table. I can’t write any more. I think I must light the fire. For I can’t go to bed. It is so lonely in bed.
    I remember something else Mr Knowles said to me. ‘Burn it,’ he said. ‘Burn it.’ And then he added, quietly, ‘If you can.’
    . . . I’ve lit the fire, and been out to get more coal. I have come back. I didn’t bring any coal. The sack was still there, where it was this morning. Rolled up into a kind of ball. I touched it with my foot.
    It was hard.

IV
    Art Thou Languid?
    They had been in business together for over twenty years, a partnership that was broken, first, by the departure of Mr Hoare to his native town in Yorkshire (in 1941 ), and, very soon after, by the death of Mr Weary. So, for the last time, the shutters were put up to the music shop on Calverley Hill and the names were almost forgotten, commemorated only by those who knew a little of the inner history of the partners, and by the words themselves – Weary and Hoare – painted in blue and gold letters above the long peeling shutters of the bay windows. Inside the shop the stacks of music, the gramophone records, the busts of famous composers, the Bechstein piano behind the door (by whose means Mr Hoare had liked to interpret the ‘Valse Triste’