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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

  “Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times

  “Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ

  “While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail

  “Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman

  “Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness

  “A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat

  “Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig

  “A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo

  “A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka

  The Punctual Rape

  Campbell Armstrong

  For Iain and Stephen

  and for my mother and

  father with love

  The soul shrinks

  From all that it is about to remember

  From the punctual rape of every blessed day …

  RICHARD WILBUR

  Part One

  ‘I didn’t touch her. I couldn’t have raped her.’

  S. Berg

  One

  Mrs Jacobitz, the widow who owned the house, showed Berg to his room. From the slope of the walls and the high position of the window he assumed that it had been an attic at one time. There was a wooden cabinet, a table and chair, and a small bed covered with a patchwork quilt. Although the window was open a couple of inches the place smelled stale.

  The widow said, ‘I should think that you’ll be comfortable here. Don’t you?’

  Berg, who was now seated on the bed, felt like answering that he would be even more comfortable if there were an easy chair in the room or if the bed were a little less hard. But he realised that he was judging the place as though it were a city apartment, which it wasn’t—and since he had come in a sense to a different world from the one he knew, he would have to make concessions and allowances rather than pointless comparisons.

  ‘It seems perfectly adequate,’ he answered.

  The widow looked at him quickly, as if his remark contained the germ of an insult. Adequate, he thought: of course it wasn’t the correct word, it had undertones of condescension.

  ‘I mean,’ he began, and then stopped. To explain himself could only cause confusion. ‘Yes, it reminds me a little of my own home.’

  ‘Does it? Does it really?’ the widow asked.

  Berg took out a cigarette and lit it. He smoked rarely, generally only when he felt tense.

  ‘Is there an ashtray?’

  Mrs Jacobitz looked round the room but did not answer him. At first it occurred to him that she was looking for an ashtray and that only his presence restrained her from opening the cabinet or searching under the bed. Yet there was a vagueness about her expression that suggested she was killing time rather than fulfilling a definite purpose. After a while, Berg went to the window and flicked his ash out.

  ‘I expect you’re tired and want to rest,’ the widow said.

  ‘I’d like to. But I have to see Mr Lazlow.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  Mrs Jacobitz sighed and wiped her hands on her apron, twisting each finger individually in the cloth as though she were wrapping fragile objects for a long and hazardous journey. As she did this, Berg noticed that the fingers were swollen with arthritis and that as she pulled on them the bones cracked, a noise he found intolerable.

  And then she sat down on the bed and stared at her feet. She was wearing a pair of tattered slippers of a kind Berg had last seen at the end of the war, when they were fashionable. Perhaps it took a long time for fashions to reach this remote corner of the country.

  Then, quite suddenly, she said, ‘My husband died three years ago on April the first. From food-poisoning. He was a woodman, you see, and one day he mistook toadstools for mushrooms. His death was an accident.’

  Berg, having thrown the end of his cigarette from the window felt obliged to say, ‘It’s a common enough mistake.’ He waited while the widow paused, wondering if there was more of the story to follow or if there was somehow a connection between Mr Lazlow—whose name, after all, had just been mentioned—and the unfortunate woodman. But Mrs Jacobitz rose from the bed and said nothing.

  Berg shook his bead. His whole body was consumed with tiredness and his brain still echoed to the remembered rhythms of the train. He licked his lips which had suddenly become dry and said, ‘Still, you would think that a woodman would be able to tell the difference between mushrooms and toadstools. After all, he works in close contact with nature——’

  Mrs Jacobitz looked at him with suspicion and alarm. ‘What are you saying? Are you suggesting that his death wasn’t an accident? That he took his own life?’

  ‘Please, don’t misunderstand me,’ Berg said, wondering why the widow had raised the matter in the first place and annoyed with himself for being foolish enough to speculate further. ‘I’m simply saying that since he probably knew the difference between the two, it makes his death even more tragic.

  ‘Tragic, yes,’ the widow said, but without conviction, as if she suspected Berg’s motives.

  For his part, Berg resolved there and then to let the matter drop. ‘Can you direct me to Mr Lazlow’s office?’

  The widow, who had been standing by the door, moved into the centre of the room and closed her eyes while she visualised the directions.

  ‘Turn right as you leave the house. Walk until you reach the junction in the road and then turn left. Two hundred yards further along you’ll see the Anniversary Monument which you can’t miss. On the other side of the Monument you’ll see Lazlow’s office. A brown building on the corner.’

  Berg turned to look at his face in a small cracked mirror that hung near the window. He needed a shave, but there wasn’t time. He combed his hair quickly and then turned to leave.

  ‘Supper is served at seven,’ the widow said. ‘I hope you won’t be late.’

  Berg followed her out of the room and down the stairs. He was agitated a little by the fact that she moved slowly and that the staircase was too narrow to allow him to pass her. All the same, he was glad to be out of the stuffy room.

  When they reached the ground floor, she turned to him and began to repeat the directions. He was forced to interrupt her.

  ‘I must get a move on,’ he said.

  The widow smiled. ‘I hope your stay in my house will prove to be a pleasant one.’

  Outside, in the thin morning sunlight, he thought briefly about the death of the woodman and then put the matter out of his mind.

  Two

  Through the window beyond Lazlow’s head he could see a horse and cart go down the street. For a moment his attention was diverted from what Lazlow was saying and, realising that he had not heard the last two or three sentences, he became nervous. Was it a direct consequence of his tiredness, this inability to concentrate? Or had it always been a fault? He could not remember.

  Lazlow paused long enough to take a cigarette from his jacket. He searched for a match and when he failed to find one he began to dissect the cigarette with a paper-knife.
Berg watched this performance without surprise; in his state of nervous fatigue, he felt that he had let slip the reality of the situation and that in any case there was nothing particularly surprising in the sight of a man carving a cigarette with a knife.

  ‘Is your health good?’ Lazlow asked.

  ‘As I said in my application form, I’ve never had any serious illnesses. I had chickenpox as a child——’

  ‘What about complaints that you would describe as other than serious?’ Lazlow had finished with the broken cigarette and was now sweeping a little pile of tobacco and some shreds of paper to the side of his desk.

  ‘I had my tonsils removed, of course,’ Berg said.

  ‘Why “of course”? Is it a universal principle that people beyond a certain age no longer have their tonsils?’

  Berg allowed himself a little laugh which—when he saw that Lazlow had remained serious—he quickly contained. He had no wish to give Lazlow an impression of levity; rather, he wanted to impress him that here was a serious individual, capable of concentration and diligence.

  ‘Anyway, your health isn’t of any great importance in this post,’ Lazlow said. He took Berg’s application form from a drawer and spread it on the desk. Seeing this, Berg was alarmed. His own handwriting, dense and black and affected, embarrassed him—even if he couldn’t remember now what he had actually written. Besides, since he had already received official confirmation that the post was his, what was the point of the interview? Was the position now in some doubt? Had there been confusion? Had they changed their minds about him? Worse still, had he made the two day journey from the capital—two days huddled alongside strangers in a sticky, noisy railway compartment—for nothing? No, he thought; he was worrying unduly. It was only natural that Lazlow, who would be his superior, should want a chance to get to know him.

  ‘The post is entirely sedentary and will not involve strenuous activity. For one thing, you won’t need to go to the Site. If you ever have to contact the Site Agent, you use the telephone. So the state of your health, you see, is of little real significance. But I had to ask. For the record, you understand.’

  Berg smiled again, though feebly this time, in such a way that his expression was open to various interpretations. The last thing he wanted was for Lazlow to consider him frivolous.

  Lazlow rose, holding the application in one hand.

  ‘Your main function here will be to check invoices against original orders. For discrepancies. The work calls for a sharp eye and a quick brain.’

  Lazlow walked up and down the room staring at the form as if it were itself an invoice that had to be scrutinised for errors—which, Berg thought, in a sense it was. On the form he had written as many of the remembered details of his life as were required. But had he omitted anything? Were there discrepancies? In his fatigue, the room seemed to swim before his eyes.

  Lazlow sat down. ‘It isn’t often that we get someone coming up here from the capital. Usually the traffic runs in the other direction. There isn’t much in this town to attract a man born and bred in the city, like yourself … Unless, of course, he has a taste for the quiet life.’

  Berg cleared his throat, pleased that Lazlow’s scrutiny of the application seemed to be at an end. ‘I felt like making a change,’ he said.

  ‘Change is often the harbinger of chaos,’ Lazlow said. He immediately wiped his lips with the back of his hand as if he regretted the remark. His eyes—which were small and intensely bright—had a fixed appearance, like those of someone seeking to bring a distant object into focus. ‘You will report for work tomorrow morning at eight.’

  ‘Yes,’ Berg said. He was inclined to add that he was an early riser by nature, as well as being industrious and conscientious, but decided against it. He also had it in mind to ask some questions about the nature of the work on the Site, but these could wait until his work had begun. He got up from his chair and for a moment he and Lazlow stared at each other.

  They went together to the door.

  ‘How are your lodgings?’ Lazlow asked. ‘Mrs Jacobitz has a splendid reputation.’

  Berg, who was on the point of saying something critical about the spartan nature of his room, was deterred by Lazlow’s remark on the widow’s reputation—and before he had time to say anything at all, he had been shown on to the street.

  ‘Until tomorrow,’ Lazlow said.

  Outside, Berg walked in the direction of his lodgings. The interview, he thought, had gone quite well—in spite of the fact that he needed a shave and a good night’s sleep. The train journey from the capital, to say the very least, had been an ordeal. The compartment had been full of agricultural workers making the trip northwards, who had insisted on drinking and singing and Berg, unable to sleep except in brief snatches, had watched the black landscape flit past. The journey had drained him of his energy and in some way had depressed him—as if the decision to leave the city were something he unconsciously regretted. But he regretted nothing. The time had come to make a clean break and having made it there wasn’t room for regret.

  He found his way back to his lodgings without difficulty. It was only when he was lying on his bed and smoking a cigarette that he realised that not only had Lazlow not smiled in the course of the interview but he had succeeded in looking overwhelmingly solemn. Yet for Berg it was an axiom that those who were slow to smile, those who did not squander their smiles, were those who could best be trusted in this world, and he felt that Lazlow was a man on whom he could depend—if he ever needed such a person.

  He lay down and closed his eyes. In spite of his tiredness he did not fall asleep at once. Possibly it was the effect of lying in a strange room or possibly because his mind—against his will, against all his resolutions—continued to regurgitate images of the city he had only recently left. He turned on his side; the bed was hard and uncomfortable and he could not avoid comparing it with the one he had slept in at his mother’s apartment … although that seemed an age away now.

  Three

  When he woke in the late afternoon he was aware of someone else in the room. He sat up quickly and rubbed his eyes, expecting to see Mrs Jacobitz. But instead there was a woman he had never seen before. She was standing at the end of the bed watching him, and from the fixed manner in which she stood he at once assumed that she had been observing him while he slept—a thought he found embarrassing. Had he been snoring? Muttering in his sleep? Scratching himself?

  He fumbled around in the blankets, found his cigarettes, and lit one.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’

  The woman smiled. ‘I’m Monika. Mrs Jacobitz’s niece.’

  ‘My name is——’

  ‘Mr Berg. You’re our new lodger.’

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and placed her hands together on her lap. A little uneasily Berg smiled and offered her a cigarette.

  ‘No thank you,’ she said.

  Berg guessed that she was about thirty-five, his own age, although it was hard to be sure. For one thing, she was dressed entirely in black which might have made her look older. Her face was plain, although she had what seemed to him an attractive mouth, and her hair, piled up at the back and held in place by pins, was a pleasant yellowy brown.

  ‘I gather that you’ve come up here to work,’ she said.

  Berg nodded. ‘Don’t think me ill-mannered, please, but is there any reason why you entered my room?’

  ‘Simply to introduce myself.’

  Berg rose from the bed and put his cigarette out of the window. It was a simple enough explanation yet it did not explain why, when she had seen that he was asleep, she had not turned round and left the room. It was a common decency, after all, to allow a person to sleep in peace.

  ‘Had you been waiting long for me to wake?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I’d only just come in.’

  Of course, thought Berg, there was no way of substantiating the truth of her remark: it may equally have been false. But he was prepared to give her the benefit
of any doubt, if only to spare himself the discomfort of thinking she had been watching him while he slept. He walked up and down the room and eventually came to a halt by the table. He did not know why, but her presence unnerved him.

  ‘Do you think you’ll enjoy working here?’ she asked. She was now kneeling on the bed, her eyes fixed on him intently.

  ‘I imagine so,’ he answered.

  ‘Your work will be clerical?’

  ‘To begin with. There might be prospects of advancement later.’

  ‘Then you’re ambitious?’ Monika laughed and clapped her hands, like a child understanding a joke.

  ‘No more ambitious than the next man,’ Berg said. He felt a terrible lethargy all of a sudden and wanted nothing more than to lie down on the bed—which he couldn’t do so long as she was there. He sat down at the table and drummed his fingers.

  ‘My bedroom is just through the wall from this one,’ Monika said.

  ‘Is it?’ Berg wondered if he detected a note of sudden familiarity in her voice: he couldn’t be certain. But the information seemed entirely superfluous, the sort of knowledge that might be useful in, say, the event of a fire. He stopped drumming the table and began to suck his fingernails, a nervous habit that he should have left behind him in the city—as he had left so many other things.

  ‘My aunt Vera sleeps on the ground floor. And when she sleeps, believe me, she really sleeps.’

  ‘You mean she sleeps soundly?’

  ‘Exactly that.’ Monika blinked—or was it, Berg wondered, a crude attempt at a wink? ‘What time is it?’

  Berg looked at his watch. ‘Five thirty.’

  ‘Supper isn’t until seven. Perhaps we could walk round the town for an hour or so. I could show you the sights.’

  Divided between his fatigue and the prospect of getting Monika out of his room, Berg thought for a moment. There was something about the way she sat on the bed, something about the manner in which her hands jumped from time to time up to her hair as if they were alive and apart from the rest of her, that disturbed him. But he could not put his finger on it.