The punctual rape, p.17
The Punctual Rape, page 17
‘Who is that?’ Berg asked.
Sbodin said, ‘The jailer. He won’t give you the chance to get free.’
They covered another few yards. Berg thought that if he could get to the capital his mother would conceal him for a few days. The apartment was large, there were at least nine or ten rooms. She would no doubt be annoyed by the fact that he had run away, but she would be pleased—if not to see him—to have someone attend to her prescriptions and medicants. He hesitated. If he went over the wall and made for the railway station and smuggled himself on to a freight train and remained perfectly still for two days he would reach the capital without any trouble. He turned to look at Sbodin. The man was yawning again, his eyes half-shut.
Berg suddenly swung out with his hand, catching Sbodin by surprise and knocking him off balance. He leaped on to the wall and saw that the drop on the other side was almost fifteen feet at a rough estimate—but he would have to take the chance. Sbodin shouted something. Feet clattered across the concrete. Someone else began to shout. Poised on the wall, Berg hesitated: it seemed to him that he held in his grasp in that burning second of time his own future—that the choice to jump would decide the outcome of his life. In that second it seemed that a hundred different thoughts raced through his mind, images that had nothing to do with his present predicament, irrelevant pictures, remembered faces and landscapes, pointless things. He hesitated. Below him lay the leap into darkness. At his back someone was hurrying across the yard and Sbodin, rising with unusual slowness, was calling his name.
Berg looked down. Through the darkness it was impossible to make out shapes. There were shadowy clumps that might have been bushes but he couldn’t be certain.
‘Why don’t you jump, Berg? What are you waiting for?’
He hardly heard Sbodin’s voice. He threw his body into the air and dropped for what felt like a long time. Wind rushed around him, blood whistled in his brain, rain froze against his breath. He heard his mother say that she was waiting for him, she had been waiting for what seemed to her like a long time, growing a little wearier and more impatient with each passing day. He felt his hand, the whorls of his fingertips, imbedded in her flesh.
He saw a single flash reflected in the sky and heard the sound of thunder. He breathed heavily, his arms and legs aching. The fall had cost him a great deal of effort and he knew that until he caught his breath he would not be able to run. Striking the earth hard had shaken his bones. He looked up at the flares that were sparking through the night sky—yet there was an unreality about this sight that he did not entirely understand. The world seemed, quite inexplicably, to have yet another dimension—a place where lights exploded but did not leave after-images in the sky, where sounds coagulated into a meaningless jumble like the rumblings of some monstrous machine.
He held his breath a moment and thought about the sequence of events. His thoughts had a bright new clarity and certain facts became amazingly clear. He was not, as he had previously suspected, the victim of some elaborate joke—he was the victim of a terrible collection of lies and bad judgements. It was astonishing how clear all this now seemed. He was innocent: his one crime—if that was what you could call it—had been to stumble accidentally into a web of malice. He knew beyond any doubt that Monika had lied, that her every utterance had been false. He knew that the widow was not dead, that even now she was in some hospital bed with mild concussion. He knew that Sbodin had been totally misled by a complex tissue of circumstance, falsehood, and his own overwhelming ambition to make an arrest. It was all so ludicrously clear that any minor doubts he might have had about himself disintegrated at once. He had simply been caught up in the complicated interplay between certain people whose versions of reality did not coincide with his own. How clear it all was, how staggeringly clear.
If there was one aspect of it all that he did not understand it was why they were all—without exception—out to destroy him. But even that seemed a minor point now.
He turned on his side and thought of his mother and realised that in a strange way he was looking forward to seeing her again—even if, as he now considered this possibility, he could not bring to mind an image of her face. He felt a slight ache of guilt that he had walked out on her the way he had done and hadn’t written to tell her that he was alive and well.
The sound of voices through the darkness made him want to rise and, breathing heavily, his strength ebbing away like the tide rushing back from a beach, he wondered in which direction he ought to run.
Part Three
‘You realise that there is now no definite proof that Berg committed any crime?’
Jacob Sbodin
One
Sbodin’s superior peered miserably through the darkened rain and the huge splashes that slithered across the lenses of his glasses. Now and again he shivered and turned the collar of his raincoat up to his neck.
He said, ‘I hate being dragged from my bed——’
‘In the circumstances, I wanted to talk to you,’ Sbodin said.
With a great show of impatience, the other man sighed and stamped his feet. ‘Talk. But make it quick.’
Sbodin threw away his sodden cigarette. ‘You already have the report of my investigation of Berg’s activities. It’s quite beyond my experience to make any judgements about the man’s sanity——’
‘Then don’t.’ The other man belched and yawned several times.
‘You realise that there is now no definite proof that Berg committed any crimes? In the case of Monika Jahn, it’s pretty clear that he did in fact rape the woman. The evidence points in that direction.’
‘Hurry,’ the other man said and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.
‘In the case of the widow, how can we ever be sure that she didn’t slip? There is no way of proving that she was pushed. She isn’t going to come back to life and tell us the truth——’
‘Obviously not.’
Sbodin looked round the darkened area in which they stood. He was silent for a time, prodding something that lay on the sodden earth with his foot. And then he said, ‘And as for his mother, don’t you think it too much of a coincidence that the time of her death coincides with Berg’s departure from the city? But how can it ever be proved that she was strangled by her own son? It’s frustrating, because I know that he did it. As for proof …’ Sbodin shrugged and looked at his superior.
The other man said, ‘That’s it. There’s nothing more to talk about. The cases are closed.’
Sbodin seemed not to hear. He said, ‘I found it necessary to shoot him, you do understand that, don’t you? I didn’t aim deliberately to kill. I aimed, as I was taught, to wound. It was dark, I misfired and the bullet penetrated the lung.’
The other man seemed to shrink inside his raincoat. He looked down at Berg’s corpse, now covered by a tarpaulin that was gathering tiny pools of water in its folds.
‘You misfired,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Sbodin said. ‘His death was an accident.’
Both men paused for a moment and then turned and walked up the muddy slope.
About the Author
Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.
Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1970 by Campbell Black
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0414-5
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Campbell Armstrong, The Punctual Rape
