CHAPTER
NINE: A MOST UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY
At last Monday arrived
and, having attended to some outstanding domestic business in the morning,
Deirdre Gray stood poised for action at the door to the house where Peter
Morrison lived, her heart beating expectantly for the footsteps in the hall
that would answer her mechanical summons and bring her face to face with
someone she hadn't seen in years. It was
a pleasantly mild day, bright and dry, which made a change from the recent
spate of inclement weather. She hardly
needed to wear the long fur coat she had automatically resorted to that
morning, more out of habit than premeditated response to the weather. Nevertheless she always took a special pride
in looking lady-like and feeling smug.
To some extent a distinguished appearance kept the monkey-rabble at bay,
and when one was visiting a largely lower-class area like this, it was just as
well to have an expensive-looking coat on one's shoulders.
At length the doorbell was answered, and Deirdre found herself
confronted by a young woman of extensively raffish appearance. "Oh, excuse me, but does a Mr Morrison
live here?" she automatically asked, although she already knew the answer.
The raffish young woman nodded vaguely. "First floor, room six," she
replied, with a hint of condescension in her voice.
"Thanks," said Deirdre, closing the door behind her in
the wake of the retreating tenant, who evidently lived downstairs. Ugh, what a depressing hovel she had stepped
into! She almost shuddered with disgust
as she turned to the left and began to mount the grubby grey-carpeted, creaking
stairs which led to the first floor. No
wonder Morrison suffered from a severe depression! No intelligent man could possibly live in
such a dingy hovel with impunity!
Arrived at the floor in question, she passed through a heavy
fire-door, which slammed noisily behind her, and halted at the top of the dingy
corridor which apparently led to Room 6.
There was no sound coming from within and she found herself half-hoping,
in spite of her determination to get to the bottom of Julie's mysterious
disappearance, that its inhabitant would be out. Nevertheless she duly advanced along the bare
corridor and applied the knuckles of her right hand to the cream-painted door
at the far end a number of times. Her
heart was now in her mouth, or so it seemed.
Anxiously she waited with baited breath for a response, but nothing
came. Surprised, she knocked again, this
time longer and louder. Ah, success at
last! The door jolted open with a creak
and a pale-looking man of average height but rather less than average build
stood before her. At first he didn't
recognize her, since she was standing in partial shadow, but as soon as she
spoke his name and asked whether she could talk to him a moment, his face
brightened and his mouth shot open in wonderment.
"Deirdre!" he cried.
"What a pleasant surprise!"
He stood back to admit her to his room.
Smiling, she crossed the threshold and was shocked to discover that it
was otherwise empty. No sign of
Julie. Only a rather sharp smell in the
air, like acid or disinfectant or something, and this in spite of the fact that
one of the windows was wide open, like in the middle of summer. Baffled, she blushed suddenly and stammered
something to the effect that she had half-expected to find Julie Foster there.
"What makes you say that?" he asked, as he gently shut
the door behind her.
"Only that she told me she was intending to visit you last
week," she nervously replied.
"Yes?"
Deirdre's blush deepened.
Could she have been mistaken?
"Well, I just thought that, since she hasn't been at home these
past few days and her husband is worried about her, she might still be here
with you."
"Really?"
Morrison's face turned grey with apprehension and his hands began to
tremble slightly. "Julie told
you?" he repeated, in subdued astonishment.
"Why, yes," Deirdre confirmed. "She phoned me last Wednesday to say
that she had visited you the day before and had been invited to do so on
Thursday as well. Since then, I haven't
heard anything from her."
Morrison had gone across to the open window in order to close
it. "Are you sure you're not
imagining things?" he queried, turning round. "I mean, are you absolutely certain she
mentioned me personally?"
"Yes, positively."
There was a moment's shocked pause while he endeavoured to
gather his thoughts and steady his nerves, which were fast becoming something
of a serious liability. At length, he
drew attention to the room's only armchair and requested Deirdre to take a
seat, which she reluctantly did, not bothering to remove her fur coat. "And you think I may have hidden her
somewhere, is that it?" he commented, almost insolently.
"Well no, of course not," Deirdre responded, blushing
some more. "Only ... it does seem
rather odd that she should be missing from home all this time, with no apparent
explanation. Her husband phoned us - my
husband and me - late last Thursday evening, wondering what could have happened
to her and, since we had no idea, we weren't able to be of any real help to
him."
"Yet you apparently knew she was with me," he
remarked.
"Indeed," Deirdre admitted. "But I could hardly allow myself to
betray her, under the circumstances."
"And what circumstances would they be?" he asked. There was a distinctly suspicious note in his
voice.
"That she wanted her visit to you kept a secret,"
Deirdre revealed, becoming flustered under pressure of her mounting
embarrassment.
Morrison smiled to himself.
Yes, how feasible that statement seemed, the dirty double-crossing
bitch! "And her husband presumably
phoned you again, over the weekend, to inform you she still hadn't returned
home, is that it?"
"No, in point of fact my husband phoned him," Deirdre
corrected.
"Oh, I see." At
which point Morrison paused to reflect, before asking: "So how did you get
my address - through Julie?"
Deirdre blushed anew and swallowed with difficulty a ball of
saliva which was threatening to choke her.
"Actually, I traced it through your landlord, Mr Stone, by first
referring to the address you had once sent me in a letter, remember?" It cut a long story drastically short, but
seemed better than nothing.
"Am I supposed to?" he rejoined, conscious of her
marital status.
There ensued another pause while Deirdre tried to figure out
whether or not the question was rhetorical.
At length, undecided what to make of it, she opted for a question of her
own. "You did mean what you said in
that letter, didn't you?" she ventured.
"I mean, you claimed to be in love with me." The words virtually spoke themselves, despite
her evident embarrassment at saying them.
"I guess I was to some extent," he unsmilingly
admitted. "Or perhaps it would be
truer to say that I'd had my love for Julie severely compromised by the
discovery of her musical tastes - the records in her collection being anything
but compatible with my own record-buying predilections. At the time, I would hardly have considered
myself a fan of the Monkees, let alone J.S. Bach! The spectacle of those records in her room,
coupled, I might add, to the fact that she already had a boyfriend whose
presence I could hardly ignore, was sufficient to dampen down my enthusiasm for
her. And since you were the only other
attractive woman to-hand, and one, moreover, whose musical tastes I
subsequently discovered to be more approximate to my own, I automatically
gravitated to you, though hardly as a man head-over-heels in love. For I was still emotionally involved with
Julie, despite my cultural disillusionment.
It was more an act of defiance, at the time, than an amorous craving ...
which goaded me in your direction."
A further blush erupted from Deirdre's face, this time with
every justification. For she had quite
misinterpreted the motives for his behaviour, not to mention the letter that
followed it. She had simply assumed, out
of vanity, that he was genuinely in love with her. "And the letter?" she asked, now
merely seeking confirmation of his duplicity.
"Written in part to establish my position in your eyes and
in part to avenge myself on Julie, though I don't suppose she ever saw
it," Morrison replied.
"No, I kept it a secret," Deirdre confessed, with
lowered eyes.
Looking at her thus, he couldn't deny that she was a beautiful
woman, even if a little on the thin side.
She struck him as a ballet-dancing type, a nimble ballerina, what with
her slender physique, aquiline nose, piercing blue eyes, and fine dark-brown
hair, tied-up, as it now was, in twin plaits on the back of her head. She could also have been taken for a nurse,
if an unusually pretty one! Of course,
he knew from experience that, unlike most nurses, she had an element of the
bitch in her character, an imperiousness coupled to an impertinence which could
prove unnerving, not to say socially offensive, to anyone unfortunate enough to
fall foul of it. Of aristocratic
temperament, she wasn't above whispering or even saying false or deprecating
things about one in the presence of others, and then under the mistaken
assumption that one wouldn't overhear it or take offence if by any chance one
did, presumably because one was too stoned or stupid or deaf or something. This public openness and apparent lack of
social tact had more than once been directed against Peter Morrison himself,
and although he pretended to not having heard it, he was by no means immune to
its malign consequences. No doubt, it
had played a part in ensuring that his relations towards her remained
relatively cool, even after he had turned away from Julie in disgust at her
musical tastes. She wasn't the most
warm-hearted of persons, in any case.
Yet if one thing more than any other had led him to take an amorous
interest in her in the first place, it wasn't so much her looks, unquestionably
good though they were, as her temperamental and intellectual compatibility with
himself. She was like an alter ego to
him, reflecting his own cultural predilections not only in her choice of
records but, just as importantly so far as he was concerned, in her choice of
books as well - literature being her principal study while still an undergraduate. With Deirdre a mutual appreciation of the
arts would have been both possible and feasible. With Julie, on the other hand, such a thing
would hardly have been possible or feasible at all! In some respects, Deirdre was a freak, an
exception to the female rule, a kind of Irish Simone de Beauvoir. Julie, on the contrary, was more the
typically sexual and maternal woman, unsophisticated to the point of
philistinism. No woman could ever be
less guilty of philistinism than Deirdre.
In her cultural sophistication, she was virtually a man!
But what of her body?
Morrison was beginning to wonder if he hadn't been mistaken, previously,
in considering it too slender to be particularly seductive. Perhaps there would be something sexually
compensatory about it which he hadn't as yet envisaged - an ardour or intimacy
which transcended Julie's calculated reserve.
To be sure, there was little of the Rossetti-like wounded deer or hunted
Beatrice about Deirdre, as with her friend.
Au
contraire, the chances were that, where Julie had been passively submissive
and almost begrudging, she would be actively encouraging, shamelessly involved
in the sexual act and providing every incentive she could, short of actual
copulation, to attain her ends. Struck
by this speculation, he wondered whether he oughtn't to attempt having it
verified that very day. After all,
Deirdre was there for the taking, despite her ostensible concern over Julie's
welfare. Would not a convenient excuse
or false explanation on that score put her mind at rest? Yes, he didn't see any reason why not.
Taking advantage of the opportunity afforded him by the silence,
he said: "You know, there was a degree of sincerity about my letter,
whatever else may have prompted it. I
was becoming romantically interested in you at the time. Still am interested, for that matter, in
spite of Julie's presence here recently.... By the way, if you want to know
what she's doing, I sent her on an errand."
Deirdre pricked up her ears.
"Oh, what sort of errand?" she asked, clearly baffled.
"A political one, actually," Morrison declared,
frowning. "If you must know, I have
some political contacts in
Deirdre felt somewhat nonplussed by this, since it was quite
unlike Julie to involve herself in political affairs, whether or not on anyone
else's behalf. Indeed, despite what her
friend had told her on the telephone last week, she couldn't believe that Peter
Morrison was involved in politics anyway, least of all in a revolutionary
capacity. And yet if he was, then it
could only mean that Julie was determined to do what she could for him in
order, presumably, to worm her way back into his affections. No wonder she hadn't told her husband
anything.... "Well," said Deirdre, after Morrison's explanation had
begun to sink in and establish something like a credible niche for itself,
"if that's the case, then I guess I'm simply wasting my time here. Now that I know where she is and am in
possession of the knowledge, at long last, as to why you once wrote me a long
letter, I may as well leave you to your own devices again."
She stood up and was on the point of exiting the room when he
approached her and put a restraining hand on her shoulder. "I said there was a degree of sincerity
in that letter, and so there was," he averred, blushing faintly. "If you must know, I think you're a better-looking
woman than Julie and would be interested in winning your friendship and keeping
you here a bit longer. Besides, since
you took the trouble to come here anyway, why not prolong your stay an hour or
so, eh?" He moved closer to her
and, putting his arms about her waist, ever so gently placed a kiss on her
lips. She stared at him blankly a
moment, as if a kiss was the last thing she had expected, then briefly smiled
and relaxed a little. He unbuttoned her
fur coat and drew her against himself, causing her to encircle him with her
arms. "I used to like the way you'd
occasionally move up really close to me," he said in a low voice,
"until our bodies were virtually touching, like you wanted to give
yourself to me on-the-spot, wherever it might be. You had a peculiar knack of being physically
intimate without necessarily committing yourself or saying anything."
Deirdre smiled coyly.
"Still have," she admitted.
"And I was tempted to take advantage of it," he
confessed, smiling in turn.
"In what way?" she wanted to know.
"Like this," he said and, applying his lips to her
mouth, he pressed a long hard kiss upon it, a kiss which mysteriously had the
effect of inducing Deirdre to wrap a leg around his legs in order to increase
their intimacy.
Yes, there could be no denying that she was a very different
kind of woman from Julie, not one to hold back when sex was at stake, and now
that Morrison felt sexually aroused, he lost no time in gaining the quickest
possible route to her affections ... as he lifted her off her feet and tumbled
to the floor with her, kissing her violently while groping for her
panties. There could be no question of
undressing her gently and slowly, like with Julie, for she was no hunted Beatrice
but an accomplice at inflaming passion.
What did it matter that she still had her skirt on, if he could get the
panties off her in double-quick time and thus speed-up their sexual
coupling? Once they were out of the way
and she had opened her legs, pulling them back in order to facilitate his
entry, he would be free to remove his own sartorial obstacles and drive himself
between them with lustful vengeance, like a battering ram assailing the gates
of a besieged citadel.
She cried out from the sharp pain of his phallic onslaught and turned
her head to one side, as if to hide it from him, but put no physical obstacle
in the way of his rapid advance. Rather,
she opened her legs wider to ease the passage of his rampant organ and so
reduce the pain of phallic intromission.
He was already riding her fiercely, like someone on the point of
orgasm. For this was the way he had
decided to deal with her - in complete contrast to Julie. He wanted to drive his member in as deeply as
it would go, to use it as a lever with which to lift the interior of her womb
up to the wall of her stomach, or somewhere nearby, and just as eagerly he
wanted to take it right out and ruthlessly drive it back in again. But this wasn't to be, since Deirdre was
doing everything in her power to facilitate his ride and keep him mounted, now
that she could sense the rapid approach of their destiny. And not only her, but he could also sense its
approach, which further prompted him to intensify his ardour and quicken his
ride. They were both heading for an
orgasmic collision somewhere further along, and nothing short of disaster could
have averted it. Within seconds he was
feeling the tension rise precipitously towards the tip of his erection, and
then, suddenly, fierce spasms of ejaculated semen surged through it with a forcefulness
he hadn't known with Julie and would never have suspected himself capable of,
triggering off a return broadside from Deirdre.
He had put a lot of effort into this coupling, though hardly to no
avail, and now he realized that he wasn't impotent after all, but simply
dependent on the right kind of woman - like Salvador Dali, who, if what he'd
read about him was true, could only reach sexual fulfilment with his wife,
Gala, and with no other. Peter Morrison
had certainly reached such fulfilment with Deirdre, and, unlike Julie, she had
simultaneously arrived at it with him.
He could hardly believe his luck!
Withdrawing himself from her, he flopped over onto his side in
physical exhaustion, the sweat streaming off his brow. He had found sexual satisfaction at last, and
with a woman whom he would previously have considered too slender to be capable
of giving him any! Now he realized how mistaken he had been, in the past, to
think that; for his speculations of the minute before had indeed been verified. There was certainly nothing passive about
Deirdre's approach to sex. She was
liberated all right, and a pussy to boot, the kind of female for whom he had a
special weakness. Why, with her fur coat
still relatively in place, despite the exigencies of their joint coupling, she
was every bit the classy, dark-stockinged, suspender-wearing feline woman of
his dreams, even down to the fine texture of her tied-up hair, which
complemented the rest of her seductive appearance and highlighted the slender
beauty of her nape. There was perfume of
an alluring sweetness behind her ears, although that wasn't, by any means, the
only place where such a sweetness could be smelt. There was plenty of it elsewhere, too!
He sat up beside her, a warm smile on his face, and began to
stroke her hair. Then he crouched down
by the tip of her toes, in order to get a better look at her crotch. "Lift your legs up and pull it apart for
me," he demanded, his curiosity growing.
Obediently she did as he wanted, her hands coming round from
under her thighs to assist in the business of exposing, to his avid gaze, the
hitherto buried treasure of her sex. He
was well pleased by this performance and, as much to tell her so as to satisfy
a nagging desire, he crawled forwards on hands-and-knees and tenderly placed a
kiss on it, which briefly caused her to titter, in spite of her customary
serious tone of mind. Julie would have
been frightfully self-conscious and bashful here. Not Deirdre!
She rather revelled in his sexual curiosity. After all, it had been a long time since
husband John had shown anything similar.
"Do you like it?" she teasingly inquired.
"Sure I do," he admitted, before proceeding to stoke
her. "You're pretty all over, just
as I had always suspected you'd be. Women
like you generally are. Their cute
little faces suggest as much. Still, I'd
long been curious to discover exactly what sort of a pussy you had between your
legs - whether it would be of the elongated or squat variety or something
in-between, how much pubic hair it would sport, what it would smell like, and
so on. Now I know and am well satisfied
that it matches up to my previous high expectations. Little diamond-shaped pussies like yours I
find particularly alluring, as should be evident by the avid response of my
cock."
He got to his feet and lifted her legs up, pulling them back as
he straddled her stomach with his back to her face in order to survey her sex
from above. She made no attempt to
resist him but allowed him to stand astride her, like a colossus, as he held
her inverted feet against his groin and continued to stare down the length of
her legs to the hairy cynosure of sexual commerce beneath. She was both intrigued and slightly amused by
his stance, and when he pulled her legs right back, so that her knees were
pressing against her breasts, and proceeded to squat down on them ... she could
do no more than wriggle a little and titter anew. Yet squatting was no less a temporary measure
than standing, and before long he was transforming his voyeuristic curiosity
into oral sex, as he gently slid himself down upon her and applied an
exploratory tongue to her upended orifice - a thing she had never experienced
before, since her husband was fundamentally too shy and morally squeamish to
indulge in oral, especially from such a dominating position as the one Peter
Morrison had now adopted! She liked the
way his tongue caressed her most tender flesh and, for his part, he was in no
doubt that the identical experience with Julie would have been more satisfying,
had she been alive at the time of his succumbing to it. Deirdre was proving this point to him in no
uncertain terms, as he orally manipulated her and listened, with mounting
pleasure, to the non-verbal responses which were involuntarily issuing from her
mouth. He would make her quiver with
ecstasy before the afternoon was out - of that she could rest assured!
And so time passed and, wearily, his lust fully sated, Morrison
picked himself up from Deirdre's limp body and slowly started to get dressed. For her part, Deirdre had only to put her
panties back on and straighten out her skirt, which she quickly did; though not
before she had taken off her fur coat and realigned her nylon stockings. Then she sat down in the armchair again while
Morrison, having put himself sartorially to rights, decided he needed to visit
the toilet, which happened to be situated between the ground and first floors
to one side of the main stairs. This
left her alone for a minute or two and, since she was sitting within easy reach
of his bookcase, she casually scanned the titles on display there, all or most
of which were on the middle shelf.
Before long her eyes alighted upon a rather worn Australian reprint,
dating from 1971, of Tropic
of Cancer, and, curiosity aroused, she fished it off the shelf in question
and began to flick through its yellowing pages.
Almost at once, a photograph tumbled out of it onto her lap. Surprised, she picked up the photo and cast
its garish colours an inquisitive glance.
Automatically her hands began to shake and, involuntarily, she dropped
the Henry Miller novel to the floor. Her
eyes were virtually popping out of her head, as she stared aghast at the
half-naked body portrayed there in instamatic colour. With legs wide apart and skirt hitched-up
round her waist, arms to her sides and a ghastly white face, Julie Foster's was
the body stretched out on the floor of this very same room, the very same
electric fire burning behind her head, the same wallpaper above it, the same
carpet hugging the contours of her prostrate form. It took Deirdre no time to realize that, when
this photo was taken, Julie had been anything but a live woman. A live Julie Foster would never have allowed
anyone to photograph her like that!
Horror-stricken, Deirdre felt like vomiting, so ghastly was the
impression the photo made on her.
Instinctively she staggered to her feet, gripping her stomach in one
hand and the incriminating evidence of her friend's murder in the other and,
just at that moment, an unsuspecting Peter Morrison casually returned from the
toilet.
"What have you done with her?" she cried, as he
approached her with a surprised look on his face, a look that was soon to turn
to dread and dismay when he realized what had happened.
"Done with whom?" he responded, feigning puzzlement.
"Julie!" came her immediate almost hysterical
response. "Tell me at once!"
He attempted to snatch the photo from her hand, but she backed
away from him in one swift movement.
"Give it to me," he demanded, holding out his hand.
"What have you fucking-well done with her?" Deirdre
repeated, this time in a much louder voice.
"I told you, I sent her on a political errand," he
replied, trying to contain his nerves and fearful of what her voice might
reveal to the nearest neighbours.
But she simply repeated her question yet again, as if incapable
of saying anything else, and this time so loudly that he felt compelled to hurl
himself upon her in order to silence her.
"What I'm fucking-well going to do to you, you nosy little
bitch!" he snarled, dragging her to the floor.
She struggled bravely, putting up more resistance to his assault
than ever Julie had done, but he held her throat in a powerful, two-handed
grip, and nothing she could do would release her from it. The life was slowly ebbing out of her as her
struggles became more desperate and involuntary, her face turning crimson. She was losing strength by the second and,
inevitably, she too went the way of Julie Foster, the tensions in her body
suddenly dispersing as she choked to death in the throes of one last terrible
spasm.
Only after five minutes had elapsed did he loosen his grip on
her throat, and by then there was absolutely no life left in her. It was a ghastly experience for him and, as
he turned away from Deirdre's prostrate body, tears once more welled-up in his
eyes and came flooding down his cheeks.
Ahead of him lay another terrible ordeal in disposing of a corpse, and
that no sooner than he had got rid of the previous one!
