Sebastian Casey, reporter for the West End Clarion, turned off his alarm, rolled out of bed and shuffled barefoot to the bathroom.
Sleepy blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror as he mowed lemon stubble from his chin. Lighted by the fluorescent tube over the mirror, the thick hair on his head glowed a brick red. The eyebrows were less red-more of a burnt orange-while the hair on the rest of his body was the yellow color of turnip. As though the quality of redness in him diminished the closer it grew to the ground. He was a big man, just starting to go to fat. He rinsed off his jaw and stepped back from the mirror, regarding his white flaccid chest and the unsightly bulge about his middle. This morning he felt older than his forty years. The sight of the spare tire saddened him, but he wasn’t ambitious enough to do anything about it.
He retrieved his copy of The Province from the hallway and carried his coffee, toast and newspaper to the kitchen table.
He settled down to scan the front page.
Under the Wednesday, November 8, dateline, the headline read:
Murder in Vancouver’s West End
Woman’s Headless Torso Found Near
Stanley Park
He skimmed the story. A late-night walker had discovered the naked and decapitated body of a woman, identity unknown, a block from the park.
Casey finished his simple breakfast, rinsed the mug and plate, and barefooted it back to the bedroom. With only a narrow bed, no wall hangings, a small chest of drawers and a night table, the room was monastic in its simplicity. He made the bed, then dressed for work. Beige cords, blue cotton shirt, gray wool sweater, tweed jacket.
He slid his window open and stepped out onto the balcony of his eighth-floor apartment. The building was old and the balcony narrow, with black wrought-iron railings. He filled his lungs with the cold morning air as he took in the black broil of sky and a street littered with leaves and branches from last night’s windstorm. He watched Albert Kayle leave his house on the opposite side of the street and step over broken branches as he set off on his morning walk. Then he watched Albert’s wife, Matty, sweeping leaves off her pathway. A nice woman, a real lady, with a quiet, dignified way of speaking. She reminded Casey of his Aunt Maeve in Belfast.
The Kayle house was easier to see now that the big horse chestnut in its front yard was almost bare of leaves. He could see its mossy roof, front porch, steps and front door clearly through the web of black branches. Except for Matty, and a pair of squirrels bounding about in the sodden leaves, the street was deserted.
He should get moving. An hour at the Clarion office, and then he had a doctor appointment.
He grabbed his raincoat and his battered Irish tweed cap out of the closet, stepped out into the hallway, and locked the door. He took the elevator down to the street thinking about the news of the murder. There was a maniac out there somewhere who had decapitated a woman. The West End was no longer safe.
While Casey was stumbling sleepily about his kitchen brewing coffee, his neighbor across the street, Matty Kayle, was eyeing her husband from across the wide Arctic tundra of their breakfast table. She thought, not for the first time, what life would be like if Albert was dead and she had her house to herself.
It was almost 7:00 am, and Albert was reading his newspaper in sour silence and spooning milky bran flakes into his mouth. The newspaper lay flat on the table between them. She watched his lips, fleshy, greedy, glistening like the pink worms in her garden.
She must remember to take the dahlias in before the frosts came. The rains could stop any day now. Then the frost would come.
When had she started feeling revulsion watching her husband eat? She watched Albert’s lips, pouting in repose, wriggling in action. She tore her eyes away from his mouth and read his upside-down newspaper instead. A skill she had acquired over thirty years of silent breakfasts.
A murder in the West End, on Haro, only a block away. She shivered. The killer chopped off her head and-what? Buried it? Took it away with him?
Matty must have cried out, for Albert was watching her over the tops of his glasses with those black eyes and that familiar sarcastic look on his face.
“What?”
She nodded at the paper. “A woman-”
He blinked, staring at her, saying nothing, waiting for her to finish her sentence. As though she were a child struggling with new words. Or an Alzheimer victim like poor old Ellie Benson on Comox Street, who couldn’t even remember her own name from one day to the next.
“Murdered!” said Matty.
“Ah.” Albert’s upper lip curled in a pink sneer as he returned to his newspaper.
She was born Matilda Harrison sixty-two years ago in this same Nelson Street house where she had lived all her life. Her father died when Matty was in her mid-thirties. Her mother followed him a year later. Matty then met and married Albert. Albert Kayle was thirty years old. She was thirty-seven. He had burning dark eyes and dark hair. He worked as a lineman’s assistant with the telephone company, where Matty worked in the typing pool. He proposed to her almost immediately.
She was overwhelmed. Nobody had ever proposed to her before. They were married that same year. Matty hoped she wasn’t too old for children. She looked forward to raising a family in the house where she’d grown up and known so many happy times.
That was twenty-five years ago. Now she was an old woman.
She refilled Albert’s coffee mug. He didn’t look up. He was now absorbed in The Globe and Mail.
He looked young for his age and still had most of his hair. His face, unlike Matty’s, was relatively unlined. Matty put his youthful appearance down to his regular exercise.
Matty had never been a beauty-she was “plain,” she would be the first to admit-and had never been smart enough for college. She wondered what Albert had ever seen in her. After a few years of marriage and one miscarriage, she had discovered Albert’s true nature. His blind, red-hot anger if crossed. He bore no love or affection for her. He had married her only for the mortgage-free house. And the bit of money left her after the death of her mother.
Albert was often out of work. There was a pattern: he would work at whatever job came along for a while, and then would be let go or fired. Then he would sit about the house for a month or so before looking for something else. Garbage pickup, road repair, gardening, swamping, janitoring-anything that came along. In his time off between jobs, he puttered about in his basement workshop making ugly rustic furniture. Or he took long naps on the livingroom sofa.
She carried her cup to the sink and rinsed it absentmindedly, gazing out the window at the backyard. What a fine place it would have been for children to play. The children she’d never had.
She would like to have a dog-a puppy- or even a cat. But Albert forbade animals. This was typical of him, acting as though the house were his. He took over most of the basement for his workshop, filling the house with horrid smells of varnish and paint. She never went into his workshop or his den. Both were kept locked. Only Albert had keys. Matty wasn’t welcome there.
If she suggested that he might help with household chores, he flew into a frightening rage.
She was safe upstairs. She had her own bedroom, thank goodness. Albert stayed away and never bothered her there.
She put her cup away in the cupboard. Once again she gazed out the window. Tiny water globules hung like teardrops from the leaves of the hydrangeas and from the withered clematis vines near the back door. She glanced at the stove clock: 6:55. She had a chiropractor appointment at ten. For her back pain. She rubbed the small of her back. Lumbar vertebra number five, or L5 as Dr. Malley called it. Why couldn’t she have married someone like David Malley, a kind man with enough tender affection for every lonely, unloved soul in the West End? She pressed her hands around her waist to her stomach, still flat and slim. And barren.
She came to realize much later that it wasn’t because she had been too old. Many women had babies later in life. The reason she and Albert had never had children was because he’d never loved her.
She tidied the kitchen, rinsing out the coffeepot, putting things away, brushing Albert’s bran buds-he always spilled some- into the sink.
She went downstairs to the basement and loaded the washing machine. The front door rattled upstairs. Albert was off for his walk. She set the timer and closed the lid. Then she went outside and started sweeping leaves and branches off the walk, debris from last night’s windstorm.