Time continued to pass and for Graham Marshall the balance between peace and fear slowly changed. The panics still came, terrors could still clutch at him when least expected, but they did not come so often and they did not stay so long.
Murder, he began to think in moments of detachment, was like any other new experience. Like sex, maybe. The first time it seemed all-important, as if it would dominate the rest of one’s life, but gradually it came to be accepted, even taken for granted. How many married men, he wondered, questioned on their way to work, could remember whether or not they’d made love to their wives the night before.
Sex only became an obsession when the impulse was unnaturally strong or when it was infected with guilt.
Continuing his analogy, he found that his impulse to murder was not unnaturally strong. Nor did he feel any guilt about the one that he had committed.
He sometimes wondered idly whether he’d feel any different if the victim were someone he knew.
Of course, the big distinction between sex and murder was that one wanted to make a habit of the first, and probably not of the second.
Graham Marshall certainly didn’t. Three weeks after the event he still found the shock was sufficient to last him for a lifetime. And he would do anything to avoid the paralysing fear of discovery.
But that fear was receding. Increasingly logic told him he was going to get away with it.
Committing the murder had been a stroke of bad luck; getting arrested for it would be really appalling luck.
And, as the fear left him, his attitude to the crime changed. Previously he had not dared to examine his feelings, but now he found he kept coming back to the incident with something approaching relish.
It was not everyone who had committed a murder.
He began to feel a certain exclusivity. The crime gave his life an unpredictable dimension. It filled the void the loss of George Brewer’s job had left in him.
The feeling was comparable to that he had felt in the old days at work when talking about Lilian’s show-business friends or when unconventionally dressed: that there was more to Graham Marshall than met the eye.
Except, of course, he couldn’t really tell his colleagues about the murder. It had to be his secret.
But it was a secret from which he drew strength. When Robert Benham was at his most patronising, when Merrily at her most precious, or Lilian at her most demanding, Graham Marshall would say to himself: ‘What you don’t realise is that I am a murderer, that I have taken human life.’
And the thought gave him a sense of power.