Shooting in the Dark

want some of this?’
    ‘I’m worried about Janet, Ralph. She’s acting strange. She’s tired out, but she won’t rest, even when she’s got the chance.’
    Ralph put six rashers of bacon into the pan; pushed them up close together so there’d still be room for the eggs. ‘It’s normal,’ he said. ‘Specially after they’ve had a sprog. Fucking hormones go crazy.’
    ‘I dunno,’ Geordie said. ‘It’s like she’s pushing me away. And she’s got a downer on you as well.’
    ‘That proves it, then. Neither of us’ve done anything. It’s irrational, Geordie. In Italy, places like that, they know about these things. There was this woman in Naples, killed her husband and all her kids and the judge let her off with a warning.’
    ‘It’s not funny, Ralph.’
    ‘Who said funny? I’m just giving you the facts, here. In them countries, round the Med, they understand what happens with the hormones, all that stuff. So they don’t blame the woman, the individual woman, ’cause they know that they’re all like that, once they’ve had a kid. It traumates their bodies.’ He flipped a slice of bacon and began cracking the eggs. ‘They just go batty, man. Plus they’ve got the sun.’
     

39
     
    I tried out the Gallamine on Miriam with startling results.
    Veterinarians have provided the world with these neuromuscular blocking agents, powerful chemicals, designed to make my task easier. They have been used for some time to immobilize wild animals and reptiles. These drugs are not anaesthetic; they work by paralysing the muscles. I could find nothing in the literature that mentioned their effects on blind women, so I assume that my efforts all fall under the general heading of research. There are more modern drugs available, but the neuromusculars fell into my hands from an untraceable source.
    Gallamine comes in small ampoules and I injected the required dose during one of our sessions, when I had Miriam bound hand and foot. I didn’t tell her what it was and this caused me some concern. If I’d told her that there was a chance of respiratory collapse she might have objected and that would have left me with uncertainties I didn’t want to deal with. Anyway, Miriam doesn’t need to know about my involvement with the blind woman. What happens between Ms Falco and me is private. It began a long time before Miriam and does not concern her.
    These considerations left me little option. I could hardly tell her that I was giving her a drug that was normally used to sedate crocodiles in the wild. She doesn’t like reptiles. The thought of them makes her squirm.
    So I stuck it in her tail and she squealed and asked me what it was. I turned her over to watch her and she asked me again. ‘What was that? Was it a hypodermic?’ I didn’t answer. She searched my face for a moment, then said, ‘What was it? What have you st—’ And she finished the word there, didn’t get to the vowel. I was put off my stride by that abrupt end to the word and I tried to work out what it might have been, working away at it mentally, like a crossword puzzle. It didn’t immediately strike me that her failure to finish the word was part of the effect of the Gallamine.
    By the time I realized what was happening her facial muscles had stopped functioning. Her eyes were staring with fright. I saw the muscles in her neck go and was quick enough to feel her shoulders and arms as they relaxed. Within moments she was a dead weight, incapable of resistance of any kind. The whole process took little more than a minute.
    I untied her and carried her to our bedroom, wrapped her in the quilt to keep her warm. Her breathing was shallow and her body utterly still and I was taken by her resemblance to a wax model. She looked unreal. A nude of Miriam wrapped in a quilt, which would not have been out of place in the stillness of Madame Tussaud’s exhibition.
    I was sent a vision, then, during those next few minutes, while Miriam was lying there like some cherry-lipped maiden awaiting the kiss of a frog prince. There was a blinding snowstorm - this is in the vision - and an overnight freeze. In the morning the snow has stopped falling and the boys are creating long slides in the street. There is the stillness of frozen weather, like an echo of the stillness of Miriam in our bed. But in the vision Miriam is transformed into the blind woman. Strangely, this does not disturb me.
    She stirs, the blind woman, she opens her eyes and sits up. The