The Slayer and the Slain

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

Harry Vaughan's uncle has just passed away, providing the young man with a colossal fortune. Giving up his job, Harry goes back to his roots - and to Celia, the woman he loves.

But Harry Vaughan has lost part of his memory. He feels himself ten years older, suffers from headaches, meets people who know him but whom he doesn't remember. When Celia's husband is killed it becomes clear that someone is following Vaughan's life. But who is this shadow and what do they want?

'A real psychiatric shocker' The Tablet

Release date: March 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

 

 

 

I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED that libraries should index autobiographies under FICTION. No man can tell
the truth about himself. It is not just a matter of deliberately heightening this or glossing over that. The mechanism of conscious memory itself is unconscious and, therefore, uncontrollable. We
involuntarily forget more than half our own lives—embryonic existence, infancy, most of childhood and a large part of the adult’s daily grind. Psychoanalysis assumes that normally we
remember only those things we want to remember and this may be closer to the truth than many other Freudian assumptions.

So caveat lector—reader, beware! I have always prided myself on a reasonably accurate and extensive memory as compared with other people, but I am only human. These memoirs of
mine must perforce consist of the truth as I recall it and not the whole truth.

My parents were killed in a traffic accident when I was a post-graduate student at the university where my father taught. The sale of the house and furniture carried me through my last year
there. I recall vividly the pain of seeing things Mother and Father had treasured all their lives going to strangers. I kept some of the more personal items—Father’s books,
Mother’s jewelry—but some of the things I wanted to keep I couldn’t find. I remember especially a pair of mother’s cuff-links, gold enamelled with blue. They were associated
with my earliest memories of her, but I never did find them. It was so unaccountable that I suspected someone at the scene of the accident had stolen them.

I had not the slightest idea what I would do next. My father had never pressed me to choose a career. I was an only child, and he had assumed that the three of us had plenty of time to make that
choice slowly and carefully. Now I had no surviving relatives, except an uncle, who had retired to Hawaii, and a cousin, older than myself, who was a newspaper man in Washington. My chief
recollection of him was the time he beat me at ping-pong when he was seventeen and I was ten.

The President of the University had been a close friend of my father’s, so it was he I consulted. He suggested that I spend a year or so teaching while I made up my mind what I really
wanted to do. My favourite subjects were English poetry and experimental psychology, but he said my taste in poetry was too old-fashioned. “Today you must be either seventeenth century or
twenty-first century to get along in the English Department of any college.” So he found me a job as instructor in psychology at a small college in northern New England, where I stayed for
two years.

Those years in a small college town are blurred in my memory like a montage in an arty movie. Only one thing stands out boldly—the climate. There were six months of snow, but in July and
August a humid heat that made it possible to grow tobacco under cloth. Seacoast-bred, I found that inert, inland heat intolerable. After my second winter I planned to spend the next summer vacation
at some ocean beach, even if it used up all my meagre savings. But that project was never realized.

In April of that year the stubborn snow was still on the ground everywhere north of Springfield. Skiing and skating had lost interest for those of us who were forced to stay there all winter. We
had seen forsythia blooming farther south during the Easter holidays. Coming back to leaden skies and icebound earth, hard as iron, made us all wretched and restless.

One morning at breakfast when my landlady brought me the mail, I noticed an airstamped envelope with an Hawaiian postmark. It was a lawyer’s letter. My uncle had died, and left me a
considerable fortune. Even after various taxes were paid, I should have an unearned income which the lawyers estimated as something in the neighbourhood of fifteen thousand a year.

It was as great a shock to me as a stay of execution to a prisoner in the death-cell. I had not known my uncle was that rich. I had had no contact with him since I was ten years old, so I had
hardly expected him to leave me anything. Besides, he was much too young for one of our long-lived family to die. He was only fifty-eight.

I put on my heavy, leather jacket and hurried off, without a hat, down the street to the Dean’s house. I was wearing thick shoes, but they were not rubber-soled. I suppose that is how, in
my haste, I came to slip on the ice and fall, knocking the back of my head against the kerbstone.

At least that is what everyone told me must have happened when I recovered consciousness. No one saw the accident. It was early morning and everyone else who lived on the little side street was
still at breakfast.

I was found, twenty minutes later, by some students on their way to class. I was lying unconscious on the icy pavement with my head on the kerbstone and the lawyer’s letter in my pocket.
No one knew just how long I had been lying there. They knew only that my landlady said I had run out of the house without my hat twenty minutes earlier. As for myself, I had absolutely no
recollection of anything that happened after I put on my leather jacket and walked out of the front door.

The doctor reminded me that this was quite common in concussion cases. A knock on the head could affect memory retroactively, wiping out all recollection of the few minutes that preceded the
accident, though earlier and later memories were retained perfectly.

I had often heard this, but I was more interested in it now it had happened to me. I asked the doctor if he thought it possible that human memory receives impressions something the way melted
wax does, so that the impression requires a few seconds to harden if the mould is to become permanent. He merely shrugged and remarked that he didn’t think physical analogies were useful in
psychology. But he admitted that the first question on recovering consciousness is usually: “What happened?” rather than the traditional: “Where am I?”

Like most G.P.’s, he knew little about experimental psychology. Even I, who knew more, had no idea why memory immediately before concussion should be affected when memory immediately after
concussion is not.

But to me it suggested that memorizing is a slightly slower process than we psychologists have ever fully realized. It must be if the product can be destroyed when the process is interrupted by
a blow on the head. After all, certain incidents had happened just before I slipped and fell. Obviously my mind had not had the few extra minutes it needed to make a permanent record of them.

Somehow those lost twenty minutes worried me out of all proportion to their probable significance.

The doctor was amused. “Why do you care? You’ve only lost a few minutes out of your life and you may recover them some day. That does happen.”

“How does it happen?”

He shrugged again. “I’m telling you? As a psychologist you should know that we know very little about the mechanism of memory. It’s one of the great mysteries. All I can tell
you is that, in a few weeks or months, everything that happened in those lost minutes may come back to you, clear and complete. The broken link in the memory chain often mends itself automatically,
just as a healthy bone knits after fracture. It’s almost as if some minor clerk in your brain said suddenly: ‘Oh, there’s that folder I was going to put in the file when I was so
rudely interrupted the other day. Better get it in now.’ ”

“And then I’ll know everything that happened?”

“Everything.” He smiled as he snapped his bag shut. “Not that I suppose it’s of any importance in your case. After all, just a slip on the ice . . . though it might have
killed you.”

 

 

 

I WAS A LITTLE shocked the first time I looked in the mirror after the accident. All the lines in my face had deepened and
I could see a slight sprinkling of grey hairs at either temple. Even my expression was suddenly that of an older man. Or was that an illusion prompted by vanity? They say you never see your own
face as others see it because the face you see in a mirror is more self-conscious. Just as you never hear your own voice as others hear it because its tone is distorted by your skull’s
resonance. It is hard to obey the philosophic injunction: Know thyself. Perhaps a man knows less about himself than anyone else he encounters.

I was still in the infirmary when I had my talk with the Dean. “How are you feeling, Vaughan?” he inquired urbanely.

I answered him a little ruefully. “I feel twenty-six but I certainly look thirty-six or more now!”

“And I was just thinking the rest had done you good,” he insisted blithely. “Indeed I think you look younger than you did before this happened. It’s something about your
expression. More relaxed.”

This was so obviously the cheerful sort of lie handed out to invalids that I couldn’t think of any honest reply.

“Does your head bother you?” he went on.

“I have a slight headache now and then. Nothing that aspirin won’t settle.”

“I understand you’re to be congratulated.” His tone told me at once that he rather resented the idea of a young man of twenty-six, without dependants, suddenly finding himself
master of a handsome, unearned income.

When I told him I was resigning, he assumed that I would use my capital to invest in some business that would ensure me an important managerial position as well as a larger income. I gathered
that this was the correct thing for an able-bodied young man with money to do. But I have never cared particularly about doing the correct thing, and it seems to me that the most precious things
money can buy are leisure, liberty and privacy.

When I told him I was not going into business, he asked me a little testily: “Then what are you going to do?” I think he was already visualizing me as a minor eccentric in that
freakish circle where the young rich meet the entertainment and luxury trades on the socially neutral ground of Manhattan night clubs. He was so sure that dissipation is the only alternative to
drudgery that I was almost sorry to disappoint him.

I said: “I’m going back to Virginia.”

“Back?”

“My father was a Philadelphian, but my mother was a Virginian. She came from a little place called Clearwater. It’s only fifty miles from Washington in terms of space, but it’s
a hundred years away in terms of time. She always said it should be called ‘Backwater’.”

“You’ll be buried alive there!”

“I’ve been buried alive here. There, at least, I won’t have snow on my grave in April.”

“But what will you do there?”

“It’s fox-hunting country. I shall breed hunters.”

“My dear boy, it will be intellectual death for you!”

“It’s what I want to do.”

“But it’s utterly different from anything you’ve ever done before. What do you know about horses?”

“Nothing. But I can learn.”

“All your training in psychology wasted!”

“Wouldn’t it be wasted in business?”

“Not necessarily. Modern marketing methods . . .”

His voice droned on, but I didn’t listen. When he fell silent, I said: “I’ll do a lot of riding, and I’ll be outdoors most of the year. When it rains, I’ll read. I
can get all the books I want from Washington. I can afford to buy them now. No more lending libraries!”

“But you’ll live in a cultural vacuum!”

“If I get bored, I’ll study the psychology of horses. Breeding them, I may find out something about the instance of acquired traits. Maybe Lamarck was right after all.”

He frowned. I had known that would bother him. Lysenko has made Lamarckism subversive, though it used to be fashionable among the European aristocracies who believed it could be used to justify
inherited privilege.

He began again. “I can’t understand your decision. Your father would have been distressed by such a retreat from life. If the shallow activity of business bores you, there are still
the universities where you could lead a deeply contemplative life. I’ve been thinking for some time that you were really ready for an associate professorship and if you should remain here. .
. .”

He paused delicately and I realized that my inheritance could advance my academic career if I stayed. But I hated teaching, so I said:

“I’m a little young for that responsibility.”

“I don’t agree. You’ve served your apprenticeship faithfully and there are other associates younger than you. Tyson, for instance.”

I happened to know that Tyson was thirty-one. He had mentioned it to me himself. But, as it seemed he must have lied to the Dean about his age, I kept my mouth shut.

Just then a nurse bustled in starchily and told the Dean that his visit had been long enough. As they went out, my eyelids fell of their own weight and I seemed to drift out of my body as I slid
into the strange, other world of sleep and dreams. Before I knew it, I was dreaming about Clearwater and Celia Arabin.

She was standing in the peach orchard at Green Willow. It was Spring and every Y-shaped tree was crowned with rose. She was singing Musset’s Bonjour, Suzon to Fauré’s
music. She came to that forlorn line: Qui part trop tôt revient trop tard—Who leaves too soon returns too late—and I interrupted: “It’s not too late, Celia.
You know I’ve always wanted to marry you.” She smiled and answered: “You can, now you have fifteen thousand a year.” Which was so totally unlike Celia that the dream faded
at that point.

 

 

 

IF IT HAD not been for Celia I should have gone directly to Clearwater after school closed. As it was I decided to make a
detour by way of Washington and reconnoitre through my cousin, Lex McLean. Lex had made good use of his seven years seniority to me. Everyone from coast to coast knows the syndicated column of
political comment with the by-line “Alexander McLean”. I had followed his column in the local paper during my two years’ penal servitude in the north and I was always amazed at
his vast fund of slightly scandalous information and his gift for the mischief-making innuendo. He skidded to the very edge of the libel laws but he had not been sued yet. His style I thought a
trifle mannered and pompous. I had seen him only once since he was seventeen and it may be I still thought of him as a boy much too young for such literary pretensions.

Lex was the only son of a widowed mother, my own mother’s sister, and he was brought up in New York, where he studied engineering for a year or so before he drifted into the more flexible
life of a newspaper man. Though New Haven and New York are really not far apart, we saw little of each other as children. Sisters are not always congenial. Our meetings, as boys, were confined
largely to Thanksgiving dinners at my father’s house in New Haven and trips to our grandmother’s home in Clearwater while she was still alive. But one summer my mother and aunt rented
cottages in the same seaside resort. That was the only time I really saw anything of Lex. I was ten at the time and he was seventeen, so all our meetings that summer were characterized by
condescension on his part and shyness on mine.

Our last meeting had been at my parents’ funeral. Lex had arrived by plane from Washington, very much the busy man of the great world. He distinctly gave everyone the impression that only
his strong sense of family duty could have induced him to leave Washington to its own devices for a space of several hours. All during the service he seemed preoccupied with the possibly disastrous
effects of even such a brief absence on affairs of state. . . .

Do you see now how hard it is to tell the truth in an autobiography? If anyone had asked me when I started writing whether or not I liked Lex, I am sure I should have answered “Yes”
without hesitation. Yet what I have just written now reveals to me as well as to you that I never really liked Lex at all. Perhaps the best way to know thyself is to write memoirs. And having got
this far, I am beginning to wonder what was my real motive in going to see Lex first, instead of going directly to Clearwater? Did I really want to find out a little more about Celia and the
Arabins before I made my appearance there? Or did I look forward to showing Lex that the younger cousin he had always patronized was now a man of means?

I spent a night in New York and took an early morning train to Washington. I was lunching in the club car when a man in naval uniform started to pass my table and stopped suddenly.

“Well, well, well!” He held out a broad hand, his weathered face beaming. “Mighty glad to see you aboard, sir! On your way to Washington?”

He wore a lieutenant-commander’s insignia and he seemed like a jovial soul. The only trouble was I had never seen him before in my life.

“I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,” I said with some constraint.

I felt a little sorry for him as his smile congealed and his hand dropped to his side. “Oh. Excuse me. But I could have sworn . . .”

He passed on and I was left to wonder who he had thought I was.

Some people will tell you that Washington is hot even in June. To me, coming from the frigid June near the Canadian border, it . . .