A dense mental fog, known locally as a Kidlington Particular, grips the city, casting its Lethean spell over Members and non-Members of the University alike. Stupefying vapours shroud the environs of that ubiquitous old hostelry ‘The Temporary Sign’. Within, a throng of potential witnesses studiously ignore the two men huddled in furtive confabulation. One is short, swarthy and stout. He wears a filthy poncho, a wide-brimmed hat and spurred boots. Cartridge belts criss-cross his chest and he picks his teeth with a razor-sharp dagger. The other man is tall and saturnine, with brilliantined hair and a cruel smile. He is dressed in a white double-breasted suit and slip-on patent leather shoes and is smoking a Turkish cigarette in an ivory holder.
I — you have of course penetrated my feeble disguise — drawl languidly, ‘I want you to kill my wife.’
‘Si, senor!’ grins Garcia (for it is he).
Bundles of greasy banknotes change hands and both conspirators disappear into the night. The next moment the pub itself has vanished, together with its faceless regulars and anonymous landlord. Only the fog remains, an impenetrable wall of obscurity and confusion, dense, dim and very, very thick.
What do you mean, you don’t believe this? Are you aware that no lesser an authority than Her Majesty’s Home Secretary has given this scenario his seal of approval, and that it forms the basis of the extradition proceedings currently before this court? What’s that? You find no mention of a poncho? Very well, I’ll waive the poncho. Strike the poncho from the record. The fact remains that I am accused of conspiring with a person or persons unknown to murder my wife.
There is one point which needs to be made right away, which is that instead of providing me with a motive for murder, the discovery that Karen was pregnant removed any interest I might otherwise have had in her death. So far from the jealous fury wished on me by the press, my feelings were of quiet satisfaction. Had I not been wondering how to rid myself of Karen without prejudicing my financial position? Now all my problems were resolved: I had Karen exactly where I wanted her. She was no longer the woman who had been taken advantage of, but a common adulteress. I was no longer a ruthless and cynical adventurer, but the deceived husband. Since I was demonstrably not responsible for inseminating Karen, all I needed to do was find out who was. Once the identity of the lucky donor was revealed, I could start divorce proceedings. The proof of my wife’s treachery was alive and kicking in her belly, and a paternity test would prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Mr X was indeed the proud father. After that, the hearing would be a mere formality. Karen would be packed off to make the bed she had lain in while I wept all the way to the bank.
It should thus be clear to the meanest intelligence that even if I could have disappeared Karen without the slightest risk to myself, it would not have been in my interests to do so. As always, I stress my interests, because in them you can trust. I make no claims about what I might have done in other circumstances, I simply assert that those circumstances did not in fact arise. And legally, gentlemen, as I need hardly remind you, that is all I need to do. This court is not required to decide whether I am a nice person, but whether there is reasonable evidence that I committed the crime named in the extradition request. But it was simply not in my interests to commit such a crime. It was a fact against my interests.
What were those interests, by this time? When I first met the Parsons they had been very simple. I wanted the lifestyle which other people of my age and education enjoyed but which I had forfeited because of the wayward direction given my life by the humanistic propaganda I was exposed to in my youth. I didn’t crave fabulous riches or meaningless wealth, I simply wanted my due. Now I had achieved that, and I had also met Alison. She was my equal, my complement, my destined mate. The time and effort I had spent cultivating Mrs Parsons had not been wasted, however. While I had had no qualms about courting Karen without a penny to my name — she was bloody lucky to have me, never mind money as well! — I couldn’t have approached Alison on those terms.
But if personal insolvency would have created awkwardnesses du cote de chez Alison, the violent death of my wife would have been still less desirable. ‘We have already missed three trains,’ Wilde’s Lady Bracknell observes. ‘To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.’ As always, Oscar is right on the money when it comes to the English gentry. To be exposed to comment was still the nightmare of Alison and her kind, and whatever the other disadvantages of murdering one’s wife, it does inevitably tend to make one an object of some general interest. If the previous husband of the wife in question has also died in mysterious circumstances not long before, with the result that one has inherited the couple’s entire estate, then one may expect to attract a very lively class of comment indeed.
Quite apart from the not-inconsiderable risks of plotting to kill Karen, I thus had two excellent reasons not to do so. Dead, she would have proved a considerable social embarrassment. Alive, and carrying another man’s child, she guaranteed both my financial future and a smooth transition to life with Alison, who would welcome me with the sympathy due someone who had tried in vain to make an honest woman of a deceitful slut. True, I would have to reconcile what I had told Alison about Karen’s hysterectomy with the news that she was pregnant, but that could easily be made to seem like one more strand of the wool which had been pulled over my innocent eyes. As long as Karen was alive, I had nothing to fear and everything to hope for. So far from hiring someone to kill her, I would, if I’d known how, have striven officiously to keep her alive.
What I did need to do was find out the identity of my stand-in. I lacked both the patience and the experience to do this myself. I needed an outsider, a professional. Money was a problem, however. Our bank accounts were in both our names, but since love’s sweet song had ceased to work its magic, Karen had taken to scrutinizing the statements with an eagle eye and demanding explanations for every penny I withdrew. In common with all middle-class householders, we received a large amount of junk mail practically begging us to borrow money from them for any purpose whatsoever. I now replied to one of these offers, from a financial institution with which we had no previous connections, and had no difficulty in securing a loan of?5,000. I planned to use the capital to meet the monthly repayments until the divorce settlement came through, then repay the principal in full.
I still hesitated to call a private detective agency, though. To make my situation a matter of record with a third party who was subject to various legal constraints wasn’t necessarily in my interests. Suppose Karen’s paramour turned out to be married, with cash on tap and a reputation to lose. In that case it might well be advantageous to make a settlement out of court, the terms to be arranged after mutual consultation between the interested parties. I didn’t want any officially accredited ex-policeman limiting the options available to me, eg blackmail. Ideally I needed someone who was himself compromised, someone marginal and transient, with no leverage on the mechanisms of power. It was just a matter of time before I thought of Garcia.
Trish had given me a brief account of the allegations against him, but just to be on the safe side I phoned Amnesty International, posing as a researcher for a TV current affairs programme. Their response was unequivocal, a detailed catalogue of union leaders, students, newspaper editors, civil rights workers, Jews, feminists, priests and intellectuals tortured and murdered, a whole politico-socio-economic subgroup targeted and taken out. I was dismayed. With a record like that, Garcia might well regard the menial task I had to offer him as beneath his dignity.
I needn’t have worried. In the event Garcia proved only too eager to co-operate in any way, as long as there was money in it. The mysterious rendezvous where we hatched our devilish scheme, incidentally, was a roadside cafeteria near Eynsham called The Happy Eater. I bought Garcia a hamburger and chips and listened to him bewail his situation. It did sound rather bleak. His student visa ran out in a month and he couldn’t renew it without proof of re-enrolment at the school. Clive had stoutly resisted the teachers’ attempts to have Garcia blacked, but his idealism did not extend to forgoing the fees. Garcia’s funds were almost exhausted, and he couldn’t replenish them without putting his student status in jeopardy and risking instant deportation. Nor was his persona particularly grata outside the United Kingdom. No other country in Europe would take him, and, much to Garcia’s disgust, neither would the United States.
‘We do their dirty work for them and they won’t even help out when things get tough. Look what they did to Noriega! Makes you sick.’
‘What do you expect, Garcia, unemployment insurance? That sounds like Commie talk to me.’
‘A man should stand by his friends,’ the unhappy eater complained.
His own friends, it turned out, were now lying low in a certain Central American republic, and Garcia’s only wish was to join them. The problem was that he needed the best part of a thousand pounds to obtain a false passport and a plane ticket. I told him that I would be prepared to make a substantial contribution and then explained what I wanted. Garcia flicked his hand as though brushing away a fly.
‘No problem,’ he said in his evil English.
Back at Ramillies Drive, I bugged the telephones. The law covering electronic surveillance is a koan on which those who seek enlightenment about the British way of doing things would be well-advised to meditate. Under UK law it is legal to buy and sell bugging equipment, but a criminal act to use it. Thus the purchase of a sophisticated radio tap transmitter and actuator switch like the one I bought in the Tottenham Court Road, solely and specifically designed for the clandestine interception of other people’s telephone calls, is no more problematic than that of a clock-radio. Parents who use an intercom to monitor their baby’s sleep, on the other hand, are guilty of criminally violating the infant’s privacy.
The hardware set me back a couple of hundred pounds, but the salacious details I hoped to pick up would certainly be worth a bob or two when it came to the divorce. I knew from personal experience that Karen’s sexual behaviour was fairly unfettered, so depending on the proclivities of her partner there seemed a good chance that they might drop the odd reference to one of those practices which can so alienate the sympathies of a jury. I imagined my counsel fixing Karen with a beady eye. ‘In the course of a telephone conversation with the co-respondent, you referred amongst other things to a bottle-brush, a set of rubber bands and a jar of mayonnaise. Would you explain for the benefit of the court the precise use to which these items were subsequently put?’
The first few recordings yielded nothing more interesting than a long conversation between Karen and her mother about the trials and tribulations of early pregnancy, but on the Thursday afternoon I struck gold. Karen had made two calls that morning. The first was to a hotel in Wales, reserving two single rooms for Saturday night and quoting her Barclaycard details in lieu of a deposit. The second was answered impatiently by a man whose tone promptly went all smarmy the moment Karen identified herself. But I wasn’t listening to her. I was listening to the background noise, the cacophonous Eurobabble, the sudden eruptions of pidginshit English. In my mind’s eye I stood surrounded by the polyglot bratpack, fielding questions about the difference between ‘they are’ and ‘there are’ from a neurotic Basque girl while waiting for Clive to finish on the phone so that I could go in, cap in hand, and ask for an advance on next month’s salary.
But Clive was in no hurry to finish. He was gazing out of his window at the traffic on the Banbury Road, the receiver clutched tightly in his sweaty paw, his voice caressing his caller like a cat licking its fur. He was discussing their forthcoming weekend in the Elan Valley. He was discussing it with my wife. She told him that the surroundings were lovely and she could recommend the hotel. She had been there, she said, before.
If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t be here, Karen wouldn’t be dead, none of this would have happened. Karen was no longer of any concern to me. I’d got what I wanted out of her. All I wanted now was rid. If it had been anyone else, I’d have wished them both the best of British and turned the matter over to my solicitors.
But it wasn’t anyone. It was Clive, and that changed everything. Karen didn’t matter to me, but Clive did. Clive and I went way back. We had scores to settle. I don’t just mean his shabby treatment of me at the school. That particular Clive Phillips was merely the latest model in a continuing series which had haunted my life. Back in the sixties, when I was demonstrating against the Vietnam War, having meaningful relationships, pondering the purpose of life and seeing God in a grain of sand, the Clives were out there wheeling and dealing, cheating and hustling, packaging my dreams and hopes and selling them back to me at a profit. It didn’t bother me, not then. From the lofty parapets of my ivory tower, I looked down on them going about their mean, grubby business in the mire far below and reminded myself that they hadn’t enjoyed my advantages in life and were thus to be pitied rather than despised, difficult though this was.
Most of my peers came down to earth during the seventies, but I kept floating. OK, the acid dream was dead, flower power a flop, but hey, it’d been a learning experience, right? And the alternative still stank. I got into booze and books, travelled widely, did a bit of casual work to make ends meet, and had less and less meaningful affairs. The Clives were a lot closer now. I had dealings with them as employee and tenant. I felt their contempt for me, and it shook me. So I went abroad, insulating myself in the cocoon of expatriation. On my return to this country ten years later, I found the Clives in charge. They’d been there all along, of course, but keeping their heads down, disguising their true nature. Now the wind had changed and they’d come out of the woodwork, big and hungry and confident. I was tossed to them like a badger to dogs. When Clive Phillips condescended to use me, I was grateful, and when he turned me out I went quietly, because by then I had finally accepted the rules of the game. Instead of making vain protests to the referee or sulking on the sidelines, I set out to win. As we have seen, I succeeded.
Now I found myself humiliated and despoiled once more. Clive wasn’t to know that he was doing me a favour by giving me a motive to divorce Karen. Clive didn’t do anyone any favours. Like all free enterprise propagandists, he hated competition in any form, and took a particularly dim view of any of his employees trying to emulate his success. When three of his teachers left to open a school of their own, Clive told everyone that giving the consumer a choice kept everyone honest and he wished the lads well. Then he got his Italian agents to make block bookings at the new school for the next six months in the name of a fictitious company. The owners of the new school were ecstatic at this stroke of luck, and having spent a lot of money on advertising they were forced to turn down all requests for places as the school was full until Christmas. At the last moment the Italian company mysteriously cancelled its bookings, and that summer the school had more teachers than students. In October the bank foreclosed on the loan, and in November the teachers asked Clive for their jobs back. He said he would put their names on the list, but it was first come first served, fair was fair.
In short, Clive was not only a prick, he was a vindictive prick. Since he could no longer reach me in any other way, he’d reached me through my wife. It wasn’t Karen that Clive was fucking, it was me. A terrible fury swept over me, a rage so intense it was physically painful. But anger would avail me nothing, I knew. The teachers who had taken Clive’s on-your-bike homilies at face value got angry when they discovered how they’d been bought and sold, but their anger didn’t repay their bank loan or give them their jobs back. It merely confirmed what losers they were. While they got mad, Clive got even. That’s what I would do, I decided. I wasn’t an ineffective dreamer any more. If Clive wanted to play dirty, that was fine with me. With Garcia on my side, I could play dirty in ways that Clive had never even imagined.
Over dinner that evening, Karen announced that her mother had to go into hospital for observation as her chronic back complaint had taken a turn for the worse. She felt she should go up to Liverpool for the weekend to be with her. I generously offered to drive her, but she said she preferred to go by train. I would only be in the way, she went on, becoming rather flustered, there was really no point in it. I conceded the point, but insisted on at least driving her to the station. This she accepted. She would be getting the 10.14, she said. I already knew this, having overheard her and Clive arranging to meet at Banbury, where the train stopped twenty minutes later. I thought it was quite a wheeze getting your husband to drive you to the train and your lover to meet you off it, but Karen did not seem unduly impressed. Ever the pragmatic scrubber at heart, she saw no more in this arrangement than its convenience.
Next morning I was up betimes. First stop was the railway station, where I consulted timetables. Then it was back in the BMW and up the road to Banbury, a pleasant market town some twenty miles north of Oxford. Its railway station proved to be a charmless sixties structure with a large car park tarmacked over uprooted sidings. Once the morning rush hour had subsided it appeared little-used, and between trains was almost completely deserted. It only remained to locate the facility which I thought of abstractly as ‘the site’. After driving around the countryside for several hours, I eventually settled on a disused quarry a few miles outside Banbury. A lorry-load of broken concrete fence-posts and other construction waste had been tipped near the entrance, but there was no other sign that anyone had been there recently. There were no houses in the vicinity, and once inside one was completely hidden from the road.
When Garcia appeared at our rendezvous that lunchtime, he was almost beside himself with furtive cockiness and suppressed self-satisfaction. The manifest reason for this was that he had filled the order and was about to deliver the goods, but the real cause was malicious glee. Not only wasn’t he the cuckold, but he knew who had made me one. I swiftly pulled the rug from under his feet by revealing that I did too.
Garcia’s first thought was that I was trying to get out of paying him. He was therefore pleasantly surprised when I handed over the agreed sum without a murmur. I then asked how much he still needed. His face fell. It was quite a lot. When I asked how he’d like to have it on Monday he looked at me like the pooch in the Pedigree Chum commercials.
‘You want me to keep watching? Take some photographs maybe?’
By now we were driving around the ring road, Garcia munching his way through a pack of sandwiches I’d bought at a garage. With what I had in mind, we couldn’t risk being seen together, even at a roadside eatery with a high turnover.
‘There’s no need for that. I know enough. It’s time to act, to punish those responsible.’
‘Your wife?’
I shook my head.
‘I’ll deal with her. No, I’d like to put your professional skills to use.’
He looked suitably flattered.
‘Clive has hurt me. He’s hurt my pride, my honour. All I can do in return is hurt his body. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do for now. I would handle it myself, but I’m afraid I’d get carried away. He’d call the police and I’d be charged with assault.’
Garcia shook his head in disgust. The discovery that British justice offered no protection to husbands who took revenge on the man who had dishonoured them confirmed his worst suspicions about his country of exile.
‘But for me it’s an even bigger risk,’ he pointed out.
‘I’ll make it worth your while. Everything you need to leave, plus a hundred pounds fun money.’
‘Two hundred.’
We haggled amicably for some time.
‘Clive is planning to go away with my wife this weekend,’ I explained, once Garcia’s scruples had been overcome. ‘She’s taking the train to a town called Banbury, where Clive is meeting her. I’ll drive her to the station and put her on an earlier train. She won’t dare refuse for fear of making me suspicious. What she won’t know is that this train doesn’t stop at Banbury. My wife will thus have been sent to Coventry, a phrase which you may recall from our work on idioms but which in the present case is to be interpreted literally.
‘As soon as I’ve seen her off, I’ll come and collect you. The train Clive is meeting doesn’t arrive till ten forty, which will give us plenty of time. When we reach Banbury, you lie down in the back of the car with a blanket over you. I’ll go and find Clive and tell him that I know all about him and Karen, and I think we should have a little talk. In broad daylight, in a public place, he’ll have no reason to be suspicious. I’ll get him to come and sit in the car so that we can discuss the situation without being overheard. Then, when the coast’s clear, I’ll turn on the radio. That’s your signal to come out of hiding and disable him.’
‘Forget the radio. Just punch him in the balls, like this.’
He made a fist and brought it down like a hammer between my thighs, pulling up at the last moment. I stifled a premature gasp of pain.
‘While he’s busy counting his nuts,’ Garcia continued unperturbed, ‘I give him a little tap on the head.’
By way of illustration, he skimmed my scalp with the open palm of his right hand.
‘I knew you were the man for the job.’
‘Then what?’
‘Well, once Clive’s feeling no pain, to use an idiom which I don’t think we studied but which seems particularly appropriate in this context, we hood him and proceed to a secluded spot I have in mind where the two of you can conduct your business in complete privacy. When you’ve finished, we leave him there and drive back to Oxford, where you pop into a travel agent and book a seat to the destination of your choice.’
This vision glowed in Garcia’s face for a moment. Then he frowned.
‘But he’ll know it was you.’
‘Exactly. I want him to know it was me. What I don’t want is for him to be able to prove it. And he won’t, as long as you do your job right. The important thing is that you leave no marks. Can you do that?’
Garcia pursed his lips.
‘We need electricity.’
‘Electricity? You must be joking.’
‘Believe me, it’s the best! Clean, convenient, effective. No fuss, no mess.’
I tapped the steering-wheel impatiently.
‘You’re wasted as a torturer, Garcia. You should be writing ads for Powergen.’
As our eyes met, I had a chilling glimpse of how he must have looked to his victims, bent over them, electrode in hand, ready to place it on nipple or penis, or insert it in vagina or anus. But why should I worry? Garcia’s skills were no threat to me. On the contrary, they were at my service.
‘Anyway that’s out of the question. We’re talking about a disused quarry miles from anywhere. Strictly no mod cons.’
‘No problem. Hire a generator, one of those petrol-driven ones. We’ll need a resistor, too, to vary the current, and some leads and a couple of spoons.’
We were now stuck in a traffic jam at the roundabout by the Austin-Rover works. The rear window of the car in front informed us that the owner loved Airedale terriers, that blood donors did it twice a year and that if we could read this, we should thank a teacher. Since he couldn’t, Garcia didn’t thank me.
‘And it really hurts?’ I asked.
‘Worse than anything you ever imagined. It’s like your body’s coming apart at the seams. And afterwards there’s nothing to show, as long as you use the spoons properly. It’s like cooking meat. You’ve got to keep them moving, otherwise it burns. We had an instructor from the CIA give us a demo when they delivered the equipment, but later on some of the guys got a little sloppy. You know how it is.’
‘There’s no risk of him dying, though?’
‘I’ll keep the current down.’
‘Not too low.’
Garcia laughed briefly.
‘Don’t worry, he won’t think it’s too low.’
We drove on past Sainsbury’s and over the soft-running Thames.
‘What about noise?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we should gag him?’
‘If you like. But they don’t really sound human. Anyone who hears us will think we’re castrating pigs.’
It was perhaps this bucolic image that caused me to start whistling a tune which I later identified as the traditional folk song, As I Was Going to Banbury.
‘Well that all sounds jolly satisfactory,’ I said.
If my arrangement with Garcia had included the usual ‘cooling-off period’ designed to protect consumers from rash decisions, I’d probably have invoked it that evening. Once I’d had a chance to think the whole thing over I realized that it had all got a bit out of hand. What I’d envisaged was basically an up-market beating, tastefully applied, but essentially a good, old-fashioned, hands-on job. Somehow Garcia had made this scenario seem crude and unsatisfactory. It was like talking to a builder. You say, ‘I’d like this and that done,’ and he gives you this withering look and replies, ‘Well if you’re sure that’s what you want, squire, we can certainly do that for you toot sweet, no problem at all, it’s entirely up to you.’ Which is how people end up with knocked-through en-suite kitchen conservatories when all they wanted was a cure for that damp patch on the loo wall.
It was the weekend, so of course every rental generator in Oxford and environs was already booked. In the end I had to drive to High Wycombe. In case Clive attempted to press charges I was using Dennis’s driving licence as identification. Another incredible thing I am going to have to ask you to accept is that in Britain driving licences are accepted as valid identification despite the fact that they carry no photograph and do not expire until well into the next millennium. Since I was posing as Dennis Parsons, though, I couldn’t use my own cheques or credit cards, so on top of everything else I had to make time-consuming side trips to cashpoint machines to finance the rental. Add a three-mile tailback on the A40 coming into Oxford, and there was another day gone.
Karen was in the shower when I got home. I took advantage of her acoustic isolation to phone Alison Kraemer. I hadn’t as yet told Alison about Karen’s pregnancy. Since that tea-time conversation in Holywell Street our relations had been friendly but correct. Now I felt the time had come to take her further into my confidence, and I therefore proposed meeting for lunch the next day. Quite apart from anything else, this would do me no harm at all in the event of Clive invoking the law. ‘Now let me just get this straight, officer. Your contention is that prior to meeting Ms Kraemer for lunch at Fifteen North Parade — I can really recommend their venison in madeira and celeriac sauce, and the Chateau Musar ’82 is drinking very nicely — I had spent the morning torturing someone in a quarry near Banbury. Is that correct?’
After some humming and hawing Alison agreed to see me, although she said she’d have to be home by four.
‘I’ve got the Barringtons and the Rissingtons to dinner and I’m making a rice timbale. It’s very good, but God, the preparation!’
The splashing and banging noises from the bathroom were still in full swing when I put the receiver down, so when Karen turned on me that evening and accused me of carrying on an affair with Alison behind her back, I was taken completely by surprise.
Karen and I shared the chores like the thoroughly modern couple we were. One night I loaded the microwave and Karen the dishwasher, the next we reversed roles. That day it was her turn to be creative. She’d selected something which looked like a slab of concrete wrapped in plastic foil when it went into the oven, and like a miniature hot-mud geyser when the timer pinged three minutes later. At no point did it resemble the illustration on the packet, but we ate it anyway, although as so often I felt that it would have made more sense to eat the packet and throw away the contents. We washed it down with one of the last surviving bottles from Dennis’s cache of wine, a ballsy Australian red weighing in at about fourteen degrees. This was of course on top of our two official G and Ts each, plus whatever Karen had been tippling on the side.
Dessert consisted of some slug-like tinned fruit in a slimy liquor, topped with a non-dairy aerosol mousse whose main selling point appeared to be the fact that the propellant was environmentally friendly. Once we’d scoffed this off, Karen launched her assault. On returning home, it seemed, she had phoned British Rail information to check the time of her train the next morning. The line was engaged, so she went to have a shower and tried again later, using the automatic re-dial facility. Since I had called Alison in the interim, her call was answered not by BR’s timetable touts but by a female voice which she identified as belonging to ‘that Crammer woman’.
Everything that happened subsequently was really down to my inability to react fast enough to this freak occurence. What I should have done, of course, is concoct a specious excuse for having phoned Alison. This would not have been so hard. I could have claimed to be returning a call from her I’d found recorded on the answering machine, for example. This would have given me time to work out a suitable cover-story, and also to brief Alison in case Karen phoned her to check.
Instead, I stupidly denied that I had ever made such a call. Alison was one of those people who recite their number when answering the telephone, so Karen had been able to confirm her suspicions by checking with the directory. Not only wasn’t I believed, but by lying about the call I had made it impossible to claim that it had been insignificant or innocent. There was no help for it, I realized reluctantly. I was going to have to go nuclear.
‘So did you manage to get through to station information in the end?’
‘Don’t try and change the subject!’
‘Oh I’m not, Karen. It’s very much the same subject, isn’t it?’
She looked hesitant, unsure as yet whether there was anything to be worried about.
‘What exactly did you want to know?’ I inquired archly.
‘About the trains, of course.’
‘The trains to Liverpool, or to Banbury?’
Something flared briefly in her eyes, like a dud firework.
‘How did you find out?’
In other circumstances I would have stood up and cheered. Her response had not only put mine to shame, she had also returned my volley with awkward bounce and heavy top-spin. If I admitted bugging the phone, she would want to know what had made me suspicious. The answer, of course, was her pregnancy, but I couldn’t tell her that without revealing the truth about my vasectomy, which was far more than I was prepared to admit at this stage of the game. So I said the first thing that came into my head.
‘Clive told me.’
He eyes opened wide in shock.
‘No!’
I held my tongue.
‘He wouldn’t do that!’ she cried.
‘I can’t help wondering just how well you know him, Karen. Other than in the biblical sense, of course.’
She scrabbled in her handbag and popped a couple of 4 mg slaps of nicotine-rich gum.
‘I dropped by the school this morning to sound Clive out about the EFL business idea. We chatted for a while about how much he’d want in return for letting me access his network of overseas contacts and so on. Then he suddenly turned to me and said, “Look here, I think you’d better know that I’ve been stuffing your wife.” ’
Karen flinched as though the child she was carrying had suddenly kicked her.
‘I told him I didn’t believe him. “You don’t need to take my word for it,” he said. “You see she’s carrying my child.” ’
‘But he doesn’t even know! I never told him.’
‘You don’t need to tell him, Karen. There are lots of little signs which a man as sexually active as our Clive has doubtless seen before. Anyway, that’s all a bit beside the point, which is that while you’ve supposedly been working on your yoga every Wednesday night, you’ve actually been practising positions of a rather different kind.’
‘That’s not true! I only saw him once or twice, when things were going so badly between us two. We had a thing together before, when I was with Dennis. The only reason anything happened this time was because you were being so horrible to me. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still desirable.’
I laughed savagely.
‘Oh I see, it was all my fault!’
‘It was both our faults. But it wasn’t important. It was just a bit of fun as far as I was concerned. It meant more than that to him, though. That’s why I agreed to go away with him this weekend, to tell him that it’s all over.’
‘Seems rather a long way to go for that.’
Karen adroitly brought the waterworks on stream.
‘I was afraid! Afraid for us. Clive can’t accept that I don’t love him. I quite fancy him, but I don’t love him. I was terrified about what he might do when I told him I was pregnant by you. He’d been asking me to go away with him for ages, so I finally agreed, just so as to have time to explain things properly, to make him understand that if he cared for me he had to let me go.’
‘Sure, Karen.’
‘I wasn’t going to sleep with him! Do you think I could do that, knowing that I’m carrying your child inside me?’
‘Speaking of which …’
‘Look, let’s forget Clive. Let’s forget this woman you’ve been seeing. This is between you and me. Nothing else matters but this life we’ve created together. The rest is just play, but this is real. I know it won’t be easy. We’re too different for that. But we’ve got to try and make it work. We owe it to our child!’
I recognized this tune. I’d sung it myself once, back in the days when I was a penniless suitor and Karen a wealthy widow. But times had changed, nos et, it goes without saying, mutamur in illis. Karen was the suitor now, and I was not in the giving vein.
‘I’m afraid the prospect of surrogate fatherhood doesn’t attract me, Karen.’
As usual, she skipped the word which did not compute.
‘But you said you were! You said you wanted us to get married and have a child …’
‘Yes, but I was rather taking it for granted that it would be my child.’
She stared at me aghast.
‘It is!’
‘That’s not what Clive says.’
‘What does he know?’
‘What do you know? You can’t have been on the pill because you were trying to get pregnant with me.’
‘We used something else.’
‘What?’
She hesitated. Close-ups of Clive unrolling a sheath over his engorged member were definitely unsuitable for the family audience to which she was hoping to appeal.
‘An old balloon?’ I suggested. ‘Cavity wall insulation foam? Herbal pessaries? Whatever it was, it didn’t work. Be honest, Karen, you didn’t even want it to work. You were so desperate to get pregnant you were beyond caring who the father was. You’d probably have preferred it to be me, all other things being equal. But you weren’t really unduly worried about that aspect of it, were you?’
‘That’s not true! It’s your child! I know it is. Women know these things.’
‘OK, let’s get a paternity test done.’
‘No!’
She glared furiously at me. I shrugged.
‘I rest my case.’
‘Those tests can be dangerous! I’m not letting some doctor mess around with the foetus just because you’re a heartless shit who won’t believe what I say.’
‘If you think I’m a heartless shit, just wait till you tell Clive that he’s going to have to assume his responsibilities because we’re getting divorced.’
She stood up, her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth on her heels, muttering something I couldn’t make out. Then she sighed deeply and stroked her midriff, as though to reassure the foetus.
‘You can’t wriggle out of it that easily, you bastard! I’ll bring a paternity suit. I’ll get those tests done all right, once the child is born.’
‘As many as you like, Karen. All they’ll prove is that the only bastard round here is the one in your womb.’
That did it. She threw herself at me, shrieking and spitting, battering me with her fists and shoes. Women get a good press these days. It’s become intellectually respectable, even among those who otherwise reject gender-based distinctions, to suggest that they’re somehow intrinsically nicer than men and that the problems of the world would magically resolve themselves if we all became more womanly. In my view this is sexist bullshit. Given the chance, woman can be every bit as unpleasant as men. Karen’s expression as she attacked reminded me of photographs of Ilsa Koch and Myra Hindley. She looked quite literally devilish.
‘You cunt!’ she screamed.
The inappropriacy of this term of abuse was lost on both of us, I fear. Irony was never Karen’s strong suit, and I was too busy staving off her frenzied assault to appreciate it. Karen was smaller and lighter than me, but fitter and much more highly-motivated. She kneed me in the groin, savaged my face with her nails and battered my shins and ankles with her sharply pointed shoes. Her energy was demonic, the sudden release of months of pent-up hatred and frustration. I tried to contain her, but my defences were swiftly overwhelmed.
She wanted me to hit her, of course. That would prove her right, prove me to be the heartless bastard she said I was. What worried me was that it would prove it not just to her but to everyone. She could have her bruises examined and described and then produce photographs and medical witnesses in court to discomfort me. Those marital stigmata would transfigure Karen from promiscuous bitch into battered wife, while I would appear a sadistic adventurer who was not content with taking her money but had to beat her up as well. I would be lucky to get off with a suspended sentence, and I could certainly kiss goodbye to any hope of favourable settlement. And to Alison, needless to say.
I did hit out, but not physically. Garcia would have been proud of me. I chose a blow that hurt her worse than any punch, but left no marks at all.
‘Do you know what a vasectomy is, Karen?’
She kicked me viciously on the ankle. I gritted my teeth, wrenched her arm painfully and repeated my question.
‘Of course I bloody well know!’
‘Well here’s something else you should know. I’ve had one.’
It took a moment for this to sink in. Then her body went limp in my arms.
‘What you mean?’
‘I mean that I’m incapable of fatherhood. I’ve been surgically sterilized. Cut, snipped, gelded.’
Her eyes were wide open, but she was looking inward now, assessing the damage. Reports were still coming in, but already she could tell that it was very bad, a major disaster.
‘Then it was all lies.’
I said nothing. I’d made my point, and I wasn’t in the mood to chat. She turned away, mumbling the same phrase I’d heard earlier, but louder now, more urgently.
‘No love, no love, no love, no love, no love.’
Yes, well, it was all very sad. It would be nice if there was more love around. We thought we could make it happen, back in the sixties. We were wrong. Love’s gone the way of Father Christmas, the tooth fairy and the man in the moon. It’s for the kiddies, that stuff. We’ve grown up now. We don’t believe in love any more.
I left Karen to her maudlin reveries and went upstairs to lie down for a bit before she came back for the next round. It didn’t seem likely that either of us would get much sleep that night.
When I awoke the room was dark. Through the uncurtained window the upper branches of a tree outside the house were backlit by the streetlamp opposite. I was lying fully dressed on top of the covers. Karen’s side of the bed had not been disturbed at all. In addition to a totally irrelevant erection, I was suffering from a splitting headache and a nasty case of heartburn. The clock was in one of those positions — ten past two, in this case — where it seems to have only one hand.
I got up and went to the bathroom, where I took some paracetamol and Alka Seltzer. The upper landing was illuminated by the glow of the hallway light. Karen, I assumed, was drowning her sorrows in the dusk-to-dawn movies accessible via the satellite dish which Dennis had installed. She might even have fallen asleep in front of the set. It wouldn’t have been the first time. I leant over the banister and peered down the stairs.
For the past week, a magazine wrapped in a plastic cover had been resting on the third step from the bottom, a professional journal which Dennis had subscribed to and which kept arriving despite our attempts to convince the publisher’s computer that the intended recipient was beyond caring about such topics as ‘1992: The Implications for Your Clients’. Now, however, the glossy package was no longer on the step but lying on the floor in the middle of the hallway.
It was the very triviality of this fact which drew me downstairs to investigate. The displacement of the magazine seemed such a meaningless gesture that my curiosity was aroused. I was about half-way down the stairs — almost exactly where Dennis must have been standing the morning he almost caught us in bed together, in fact — when I spotted one of Karen’s shoes lying in the doorway to the living room. Even more interesting, her foot was still in it.
A few steps more and I could make out the rest of the body sprawled on the parquet flooring a few inches away from the hideous neo-Spanish cabinet which the Parsons had chosen to ‘add a bit of character’ to their hallway, an over-elaborate mock-antique affair with metal strengthenings at the corners, cast-iron handles with sharp edges and a massive key protruding from the cupboard doors. Dennis had remarked jocularly that someone would do themselves an injury on it sooner or later. At the time this had seemed just like one of those things you say.
I knelt down beside Karen and shook her about a bit. She looked pale, but not any more than was to be expected after the amount she had drunk. There was a nasty-looking bruise, all puffy and yellow, high up on her right temple, just below the hairline. It was clear what had happened. After a further bout of solitary boozing in the living room she had headed for the stairs, intent either on sleep or another confrontation with me. In her maudlin stupor she had failed to notice the plastic-wrapped magazine, which had performed the same function as the banana skin in the traditional joke. Karen had toppled backwards and fallen head-first against the Spanish chest, knocking herself out.
I felt a heavy sinking of the stomach, as when the washing machine backs up and floods the kitchen, or the car breaks down in a contraflow on the M25. It never occurred to me that her injuries might be serious. All I could think of was the fuss and bother involved, the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go straight back to bed. What a bore!
I grabbed her under the armpits and dragged her into the living room. An open bottle stood on the side-table next to a fallen tumbler and a puddle of spilt whisky. I dumped Karen on the sofa. She flopped sideways, totally limp. I slapped her face a few times. I called her name loudly. There was no response.
After a while I became aware of another sound in the room, a mechanical whine I had hitherto associated with the fridge or central heating. After a brief search I traced it to the telephone, which was lying underneath the sofa. Had Karen just knocked it over, or had she phoned someone? And if so, who? I was half-way through making some coffee when I remembered that every conversation on that line was being monitored on the tape-recorder I kept in the spare bedroom. I raced upstairs and rewound the tape to the beginning of the last call.
‘This is Oxford 46933. I’m afraid I can’t make it to the phone just now, but if you want to leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please speak after the tone.’
‘Clive? Clive? You know who this is, Clive? It’s me, Clive. Me, Karen.’
A long silence.
‘Why d’you tell him, Clive? You shouldn’t’ve told him. Now he hates me.’
Silence.
‘I don’t want to stay here, Clive. I’m frightened. Please come and take me away.’
Silence.
‘Please, Clive! There’s no love here. No love. It’s cold and dark, and things could happen.’
Silence.
‘Just for a few days, darling. Until things have settled down again. I don’t want to stay here. I’m frightened.’
This was followed by a dull thump, then a groan, and finally a click as Clive’s answering machine broke the connection.
I sat there in a daze for some time, replaying the tape again and again. Each time it sounded worse.
Back in the living room, Karen lay where I had left her. She looked utterly lifeless. I couldn’t feel any pulse in her wrist, she didn’t seem to be breathing, her skin was cold. For the first time I began to worry that she might have injured herself seriously. I recalled an article in the local paper about a child who had fallen off his bike. He seemed perfectly all right at the time, but the next morning had complained of a persistent headache. A few hours later he was rushed into hospital in an irreversible coma and they’d unplugged his life support machine a few weeks later.
Under normal circumstances I would have called an ambulance, but these were not normal circumstances. The message on Clive’s answering machine constituted apparently damning evidence against me. I knew that the thump on the tape must have been caused by Karen drunkenly knocking over the phone, but to the police it would sound like the blow inflicted with the traditional ‘blunt instrument’ by the jealous husband who had come into the living room to find his wife secretly phoning her lover. When it was revealed that Karen was pregnant with Clive’s child, and that they had been planning to go away together the following day, inverted commas would close in around the word ‘accident’ like a pair of handcuffs.
I gave Karen another brisk dose of the ‘Now stop all this nonsense and snap out of it’ treatment, but without the slightest effect. Suddenly I knew she was dead. What else did the word mean if not this maddening indifference, this infinite capacity for sullen withdrawal? The dead are so selfish, so irresponsible! They just piss off, leaving the rest of us to clear up after them. All the arrangements I had so carefully made would now have to be cancelled. Not only was there no hope of getting even with Clive, but I stood a very good chance of being accused of killing Karen into the bargain. A monstrous miscarriage of justice was in the making. It was so unfair, so totally unfair!
The alternative version which eventually began to take shape in my mind seemed at first nothing but a daydream, a childish fantasy of punishment fitting the crime. In an ideal world, if anyone had to take the rap for Karen’s death then it would be Clive. Quite apart from his unsavoury intervention in my marriage, he was a thoroughly unpleasant character who richly deserved whatever was coming to him. The day he was convicted, a resounding cheer would be heard throughout the EFL world as the victims of his dirty tricks celebrated their vicarious revenge.
At first, as I say, this vision remained purely abstract, but as time passed I began to speculate idly about how it might be put into practice. I fetched a pen and paper and started making notes, more and more excitedly as the scheme came together in my mind. Gradually the plan took on a life of its own, and by the time I had finished working out all the details I couldn’t have backed out if I’d tried. The thing demanded to be done, and there simply wasn’t anyone else to do it.
I had arranged to meet Garcia near his lodgings in Botley, a suburb of Oxford which sounds like a form of food poisoning and looks like its effects, gobs of half-digested architectural matter sprayed across the countryside with desperate abandon. I reached the rendezvous shortly after 8 o’clock, having stopped at the station to show off the BMW and buy a single ticket to Banbury. I’d only had a few hours sleep, and felt exhausted and depressed.
When there was no sign of Garcia at the grim thirties estate pub where we were to meet, a feeling of panic overwhelmed me. All my plans depended on his help, and by now it was too late to abort them. I drove past the pub and circled the area for a few minutes. When I returned he was there, squeezed into his jeans and leather jacket like one of the apes which spinsters proverbially lead in hell.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked.
‘Fine.’
‘Your wife …?’
‘All taken care of.’
I passed him one of the pairs of rubber gloves I’d brought and told him to put them on before getting into the car. The beauty of the plan I had worked out was that every one of its numerous and minute details were generated by a simple set of exclusion zones. I existed in the BMW but not in Clive’s Lotus. Karen and Clive existed in the Lotus but not in the BMW. As for Garcia, he didn’t exist at all.
On the back seat stood Karen’s suitcase, coat and handbag as well as a couple of Salisbury’s shopping bags containing a roll of bin-liners, an assortment of nails, scissors, a pair of Wellington boots, a navy-blue blanket, plastic food bags, a torch, a large sponge-bag, packing tape and a selection of food and drink to see us both through the day.
‘And the generator?’ asked Garcia.
‘There’s been a change of plan. We’re going to kidnap him instead. That’s almost as good, and far less risky. Twelve hours is a long time to spend bound and gagged in a car boot, particularly when you don’t know what’s going to happen when the car stops.’
‘And what is going to happen?’
‘Nothing. We just turn him loose in the middle of nowhere. By the time he gets to the police we’ll be home. There’s no evidence of any kidnap, no generator to trace.’
Garcia clearly thought that this was a pretty wimpy sort of vengeance, but as long I was paying he wasn’t going to argue.
Traffic was light and we made good time. A few miles south of Banbury I turned off the main road and let Garcia take the wheel. He had assured me that he could drive, which was true, in the sense that chickens can fly and horses swim. When it came to piloting military vehicles in a country where they enjoy absolute priority over all other traffic, Garcia’s roadcraft was no doubt perfectly adequate, but for the purposes of my plan he had not merely to get the BMW from A to B while avoiding collisions with other vehicles and the surrounding landscape, but also without attracting the attention of the police. It was too late to worry about this now, however.
After Garcia’s brief test drive we pulled over to review the practical arrangements. He pointed out that Clive wouldn’t be able to breathe through the waterproof lining of the sponge-bag I’d brought to use as a hood, so I stabbed a few holes in it with the scissors. Then we slid the front seats of the car forward, making room for Garcia to lie down in the back. I covered him with the blanket and we set off.
The station car park was full of rows of commuter cars, but apart from a few taxis there were only two vehicles outside the station building. One was a florist’s van, the other Clive’s yellow Lotus sports car. I gave a sigh of relief. My greatest anxiety had been that Clive might have replayed the messages on his answering machine, suspected that something was wrong and stayed away. I parked on the other side of the florist’s van. The train from Oxford arrived six minutes late. The passengers dispersed rapidly on foot and in the taxis. The van driver emerged with three flat cardboard boxes of flowers. He gave the BMW an incurious glance before roaring off.
Inside the station building, Clive was just hanging up the receiver of one of the public telephones when he caught sight of me. He glanced away again, as though it might be one of those embarrassing cases of mistaken identity. I walked over to him. He looked again. This time there was no mistake. It was me all right. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.
‘I think we’d better have a little talk,’ I said, gesturing towards the BMW.
Clive followed without demur. He knew there was no point in trying to bullshit his way out of it. If I was there, it could only be because Karen had confessed.
We got into the car. Clive adjusted his nifty blouson and chinos and sat there like the player he was, waiting for me to pitch. Already he was looking calmer, more his old smarmy self.
‘I know what’s been going on,’ I said.
‘Do you?’
His tone was aloof, almost scornful.
‘You’ve been stuffing my wife.’
Clive regarded me with distaste.
‘Yes, I suppose that is how you’d see it.’
I would have hit him there and then, but an ageing Morris Marina had just pulled into the slot vacated by the florist’s van. A bald man wearing a baggy cardigan and trousers with perpetual creases emerged from the Marina. He looked around with a vaguely benevolent smile and then toddled off into the station.
‘Where is Karen?’ Clive asked.
I was terribly tempted to tell him!
‘She changed her mind about this weekend. There’s a message on your answering machine. Didn’t you check it?’
He shook his head.
‘I was out pretty late last night.’
‘Quite right too. Make the most of your freedom while it lasts.’
He looked at me and frowned.
‘Pardon?’
‘Oh, didn’t she tell you? You’re going to be a daddy, Clive.’
In the rear-view mirror I could see the bald man returning with an elderly woman who was walking with the aid of an aluminium frame. I just had to keep the conversation going for a few more minutes. Then they would be gone, and Clive’s brief reprieve would be over.
‘She’s … pregnant?’ he breathed.
‘That’s right. And I opted out of parenthood several years ago. I don’t affect the tie, but I’m a fully-fledged member of the cut-and-run club. Which leaves you holding the baby.’
He sat staring straight ahead through the windscreen.
‘Did Kay know that?’ he said eventually.
His use of the past tense startled me, until I realized that it referred to the implied continuation ‘when she married you’. It’s little things like that which can be so tricky to explain to a class.
‘About my vasectomy? Of course. You don’t think I’d keep a thing like that from my wife, do you?’
His face lit up.
‘Then she did it on purpose!’
He sounded disgustingly moved.
‘Of course she did!’ I retorted. ‘To trap you into marrying her.’
‘Trap me? I’ve been begging her to marry me for years, but all she’s ever done is go out with me a few times when the marriage wasn’t going well. But this proves she’s changed her mind!’
‘All it proves, Clive, is what everyone already knew, namely that you’re a first-rate prick.’
I had raised my voice, which unfortunately attracted the attention of the Marina owner, who was still loading Granny into his wallymobile.
‘I’m sorry,’ Clive replied in a soothing tone. ‘I forgot how painful all this must be for you. How did you find out about us? Did Karen tell you?’
‘Not in so many words. I overheard her talking to you on the telephone the other day. Do you know how that felt?’
‘I can imagine,’ he murmured sympathetically as the Marina drove away.
‘No, you can’t. But you don’t need to. It felt like this.’
And I hammered my fist into his groin.
From behind the wheel of the Lotus, the entrance to the quarry looked bumpier than I had remembered. The possibility of the low-slung sports car grounding out occurred to me for the first time. I revved up and took a run at it. There were one or two loud metallic sounds like waves slapping the bottom of a dinghy, then I was inside the quarry. A few moments later the BMW appeared, cruising with ease over the uneven ground. Everything was going my way. A patina of the Lotus’s underbody paint would remain like lichen on the rocks at the entrance to the quarry for the forensic experts to find, while the high-riding BMW would leave no trace of its presence.
The quarry had not been in use for a long time, and owing to the friability of the local stone and the thick covering of weeds and undergrowth it might have been mistaken for a natural feature except for the perfectly level floor of reddish earth. That brick-red soil interested me, because I knew it would interest the police. It was distinctive, characteristic and definable. It could be weighed, measured, subjected to chemical and spectroscopic analysis and then produced in court in a neat little plastic bag marked ‘Exhibit A’. In short, it was a clue.
That’s why I’d brought the wellies for Garcia. He was going to drive the BMW, and since the BMW had never been to the quarry, we couldn’t have any of the distinctive red soil ending up inside it. He parked alongside the Lotus, as I’d instructed him, revving up the engine in the best macho fashion before switching off. I opened the front door of the BMW. Clive was lying in a foetal crouch forward of the front passenger seat, the sponge-bag tightly laced around his neck. The bag was a sporty model for jocks on the trot, sheeny acrylic with a go-faster stripe. It complemented Clive’s outfit so well he might have chosen it himself.
Our departure from Banbury had gone very smoothly. While Clive was still writhing, a blanket-draped form had risen from the back of the car like the awakened kraken to apply the coup de grace. Garcia’s idea of ‘a little tap on the head’ consisted of a vicious blow from what looked like a salami wrapped in a sock. It certainly did the trick. Clive collapsed like a marionette whose strings have been cut. Garcia explained the construction of the weapon — a sand-filled hemp bag covered with cotton and a plastic sheath — and assured me there would be nothing to show. It was all his own work, he added proudly, right down to the motto inked into the cotton underlay: TRADICION, FAMILIA Y PROPIEDAD.
While Garcia struggled into the green wellies I carefully wiped the door handle, fascia and leather-work of the BMW to remove any prints which Clive might have left. Then we lifted his inert body back into a sitting position in the front seat, taped his ankles and knees together, twisted his arms behind his back and taped them just above the wrist. It was strong packing-tape, easy to cut but impossible to tear, and less likely to leave marks than wire or rope. By the time we had finished, Clive was trussed like a chicken. I got out his key-holder and inspected the contents. There were big keys, small keys, short keys and tall keys, each marked with a different coloured blob of paint to tell Clive which compartment of his life it opened. Only one, a battered Yale tethered next to the Lotus’s ignition key, bore no marking. I removed it from the case and placed it carefully in my wallet.
The boot of the Lotus contained Clive’s overnight bag and a slurry of EFL promotional material. We transferred this to the back seat and pulled the spare wheel out of its housing. I told Garcia to dump it among the rocks on the far side of the quarry. As he rolled the tyre away I opened the boot of the BMW. The lid slid smoothly up on its hydraulic supports. I almost screamed aloud at the sight that met my eyes.
Seven hours earlier, back at the house on Ramillies Drive, I had carefully packaged Karen’s body for the journey. I had taped her arms and ankles together, then fetched the roll of plastic dustbin-liners from under the sink and worked one bag over the head, shoulders and chest and another over the legs, hips and stomach. I then wrapped a third bag around the overlap between the other two and taped the whole issue together in the manner approved by the Post Office for large and bulky objects of irregular shape. I was amazed at how easy it was to think of Karen as a large and bulky object of irregular shape. Her death didn’t mean anything to me. In my heart, I believed she was upstairs in our bedroom, snoring in the way which Dennis had so graphically described on another occasion. In the morning we would greet each other grumpily over breakfast as usual. Meanwhile I had this body to dispose of.
I picked up the bundle, lifting carefully from the knees so as not to do myself an injury, and carried it through to the back hallway. The BMW was still on the gravel sweep at the side of the house where I’d parked it when I came home that afternoon. The same streetlight that illuminated the tree in the bedroom window fell on the car, and I didn’t want any insomniac neighbour noticing that Karen was leaving home horizontally, so I let off the handbrake and pushed the car round the corner into the shadows at the back of the house. The boot was filled with all the miscellaneous junk I had rented or bought for my now-aborted project with Garcia. I transferred the portable generator to the garage and the rest to the back seat, then returned to the house, picked up my homemade body-bag and loaded it into the boot. This amorphous, impersonal package was what I’d been expecting to see when I lifted the lid again at the quarry. Instead, I was confronted by a dishevelled mass of torn plastic through which Karen’s feet, elbows and horribly distorted face projected like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis.
I touched her cheek. It was almost cold. She was dead now all right, but apparently she hadn’t been when I put her there. At some point she must have regained consciousness, only to find herself entombed in a cold steel vault. Perhaps she had called out. She had certainly struggled hard to free herself, but all she had been able to do was muss up her plastic shroud a little and prepare a nasty surprise for me, a surprise which had used up the precious seconds I needed to do what had to be done. Already Garcia was on his way back.
‘Not there!’ I called to him. ‘Further away! In the bushes!’
Once his back was turned again, I picked up the corpse and carried it over to the Lotus, dumped it in the boot and ripped the remains of the plastic sheathing off. I then snipped through the tape bindings with the scissors and let the limbs fall freely and naturally into place. I soon realized that Karen’s delayed death had actually worked to my benefit, since rigor mortis had not set in before I could remove the tape. I then carried over one of the broken concrete fence-posts I had noted among the construction waste on my first visit to the quarry and laid it out next to Karen. I hurriedly added her suitcase, coat and handbag. By the time Garcia returned, the Lotus was closed and locked and I was lining the boot of the BMW with plastic bin-liners split and taped together.
The next shock was that Clive was no longer on the front seat where we had left him. A moment later I saw him grovelling helplessly about among the driving pedals, his back bent at a painful angle over the gear housing, calling for help in a voice muffled by the sponge-bag. I bent down and struck the garishly swaddled head hard with my fist.
‘There’s no one here to help you, Clive. There’s no one here but me, and I’m not going to help you. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’ve got a pair of garden shears here, Clive. I’m going to use them on you. I’m going to prune you. You’ve been getting a bit rampant lately, Clive, a bit rank and luxuriant. I’m going to have to cut you back, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to dock you.’
I paused.
‘Or there again I may not. It all depends. It depends on so many things. On my mood, on the weather, on the number of magpies, black cats and squashed hedgehogs we pass, on whether I can pick up anything worth listening to on the radio and whether my piles are giving me gyp after a day in your shoddy little bucket seats. It depends on all that and more, far more than I could ever express in words. But one thing all those ineffable factors have in common is that there isn’t a single solitary effing thing you can do about them. You would therefore be well-advised to make the most of the one way in which you can attempt to influence the eventual outcome, Clive, which is by SHUTTING THE FUCK UP!’
The hooded figure was silent and still. I took Garcia to one side — it wouldn’t do for us to be heard conversing in Spanish — and told him to put Clive in the boot. I’d had enough of humping bodies about for one morning.
When I had planned out the day’s activities earlier that morning, the drive to Wales had appeared as a sort of entr’acte between the strenuous and demanding dramatics before and after. To them I had devoted intensive care and detailed scrutiny, but I’d hardly given a thought to the journey itself. Time was not a factor. We could do nothing until darkness fell anyway. Since the Lotus and the BMW were too distinctive to risk them being seen together on the little-used cross-country roads, I had planned a roundabout route using motorways as much as possible. Garcia’s instructions were very simple. He was to maintain a constant speed of 60 mph. I would remain some distance behind, keeping the BMW always in view. As we approached each junction, I would accelerate past and lead him to the correct exit.
Foolproof, eh? I certainly thought so. But I hadn’t done any motorway driving since returning to Britain, so I was unaware that in practice the 70 mph limit now indicates a minimum speed, barely acceptable even in the slow lane. Poor Garcia did his best to obey my instructions, but what with the queue of irate and contemptuous drivers building up behind him, and the exciting responsiveness of the BMW to the slightest pressure of his foot on the accelerator, he was very soon out of sight. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could about it, because Clive’s fancy little roadster turned out to be underpowered, badly tuned and apt to ramble all over the road if you took your mind off the driving for a second. It was while I was staring gloomily at the speedometer that I noticed the needle of the fuel gauge leaning over like a drunk against a bar, deep inside a red zone marked EMPTY.
Objectively speaking, the fifteen minutes which followed could hardly have been more banal, but they were in fact the most stressful part of the entire day. As I said, my plan was constructed on a series of strict exclusion zones. I was in one of these and Clive’s Lotus in another, and never the twain should meet. I had been extremely careful to avoid leaving any traces of my presence in the car, but all that would count for nothing if I broke down on the motorway and had to be rescued by the police. Even if they didn’t happen to open the boot and find the remains of a Caucasian female, the incident would be logged, and the link between me and the Lotus thus become a matter of official record. By keeping speeds low and coasting down any hills I managed to keep the Lotus going through a seemingly endless tract of motorway without turn-offs or signs of any sort, but when an exit finally appeared I knew I was going to have to take it. Apart from anything else, there was far less chance of attracting the attention of the police once I was off the motorway. As for Garcia, I tried not to think about what he might be getting up to all on his own.
I found petrol almost right away, on one of the roads leading away from the junction roundabout. I hastily filled up and returned to the motorway. A few miles further on I had to slam on the brakes when I caught sight of the BMW parked on the hard shoulder with the hazard flashers going, the doors wide open and Garcia standing there in his bouncer’s outfit and rapist’s gloves having a smoke and admiring the scenery. The only thing missing was a large sign saying BOOT SALE HERE TODAY.
After that things went relatively smoothly. I kept Garcia in sight to the end of the motorway, just beyond Telford, and then overtook to lead him along the country roads to our destination. Dusk was just falling as we left Llangurig along a verdant valley in which one of those squeaky-clean Welsh streams was fleetingly visible. After about ten miles we turned right up a narrow mountain road which climbed steeply to a pass and then dropped into the high valley of the Elan river, at this point little more than a shallow stream artificially widened by the dammed waters of the upper reservoir. I parked the Lotus by the roadside and walked back to join Garcia in the BMW. I was no longer worried about the cars being seen together. Apart from a few neurotic-looking sheep, there was no one to see them. We ate the rest of the food I had brought while the darkness gathered. From time to time there was an occasional thump from the back of the car. I mentally drafted a letter of complaint to BMW. ‘Dear Sir: On long trips my wife and I are frequently disturbed by the weeping and wailing of our Filipino maids, who travel in the boot. It is quite intolerable that a car of this supposed quality …’ Sign it with an Arab name and an address in Knightsbridge.
When we had finished our snack I gave Garcia further instructions. They were brief and simple. He was to wait one hour exactly, then drive on along the road until he saw me. I left him there with a pack of chocolate digestives, a can of Coke and a rather faint and crackly German pop station he had managed to find, and drove off in the Lotus.
The road ran for several miles along the hillside overlooking the upper two lakes, before dipping down into a wood and zigzagging across the overflow stream to hug the eastern bank of the lowest and largest of the three reservoirs. It was dark by now, but I remembered the scene clearly from the walk Karen and I had taken on the last day of our stay in the Elan Valley. I particularly recalled Karen’s shiver as she looked at the black waters far below.
I continued along the bank of the reservoir and across the narrow viaduct of roughly finished stone carrying a forestry trail off into the mountains on the other bank. When I reached the far side I turned the car around, then drove part of the way back. It was pitch-dark and had started to rain, a steady hushing which merely seemed to intensify the silence. I opened the boot of the Lotus and propped the torch on the support strut. Karen showed no further signs of undead activity. There was no doubt now that I was dealing with a corpse, pale, cold and stiff, the back of the legs and neck a nasty greyish-blue colour, as though posthumously bruised by bumping around in the Lotus’s boot. I’d always assumed that there was a big difference between the living and the dead, some glaring and obvious distinction, but apart from the cosmetic details I’ve mentioned, a sort of accelerated ageing, Karen seemed much the same person I’d known and loved all along. If there was something missing then it certainly wasn’t anything I’d cared much about in the first place. For most men, I suppose, sex rarely amounts to much more than necrophilia with the living.
Rigor mortis was fairly advanced by this stage, so instead of trying to wrap Karen’s arms around the concrete post I laid it along her spine. I had originally intended to tie the body to the post with the lengths of electric wire I’d bought for the torture session, but among the miscellaneous items in Clive’s boot was a tow-rope, so I naturally used that instead. I wound it round and round the two rigidities and tied the ends together in a no doubt excessive number of knots.
The next step was to hoist the corpse on to the broad parapet which ran along the bridge to either side at about chest height. As soon as I tried to do this I realized that I had made a mistake in roping it to the post first. I simply couldn’t lift Karen and the length of reinforced concrete. But I simply had to. At the first attempt we both ended up lying in the roadway, me on my knees and Karen flat out in the gutter. By leaving one end of the post there, I was able to hoist the other on to the edge of the parapet, with Karen roped to it like Joan of Arc at the stake. It was at this point that a pair of headlights appeared on the other side of the reservoir.
The vehicle circled round in the parking area at the far end of the bridge and drew up facing the water. It had to be the local Water and Sewage Authority officials, I reckoned. I couldn’t see what anyone else would be doing up there at that time of night. They would no doubt feel the same, and drive over to investigate. It was too late to heave the body over the side without being seen and apprehended, if only for contributing to the state of the nation’s water supplies which has led to an understandable confusion in many people’s minds between the two activities for which the Authorities are responsible. No, I was just going to have to bluff my way through it. ‘Good evening. Just admiring the view. This is my wife. Yes, she’s rather poorly, I’m afraid. Well in fact she’s dead, but we don’t like to mention it in front of her.’
Fear lent me new strength. I heaved the other end of the post up on to the parapet, slid it across, and shoved the whole issue over the edge. A moment later there was a satisfyingly loud splash. I opened Karen’s handbag and added the single ticket to Banbury I had bought that morning, then threw that in along with her suitcase and coat. I slammed the boot shut, got back into the Lotus and drove it hard into the parapet, denting the wing and scraping a bright patch of yellow paint off on the stonework. Another clue. The cops were going to love this one.
As I slowed to turn off the bridge I caught sight of two pale faces peering out at me through the misted glass of the parked car. Just a courting couple out for a Saturday night snog. I drove fast along the bank of the reservoir, over the stream and up the winding road through the forest to the bare moors above. There were only ten minutes left of the hour I had allowed before Garcia came looking for me. I must have been feeling a bit light-headed. It had been a day of uncommon stress and responsibility, following an almost sleepless and extremely fraught night. At any rate, I totally misjudged one particularly sharp and inclined hairpin, and the Lotus spun off the road, hit a tree and bounced off into a large patch of mud.
Advertising executives dream about people like me. Such was my slavish adherence to the ‘clunk, click, every trip’ slogan that even when driving away from a mountain reservoir after dumping my wife’s body, I had not neglected to fasten my seat-belt, so I was shocked rather than crippled for life by the collision. When I tried to reverse out of the mud, though, I discovered that the car was hopelessly stuck. All the better. My original idea had been to disable the Lotus by driving a nail into one of its tyres — the spare wheel had been removed at the quarry, supposedly to make room for Karen’s body — but my accident had achieved exactly the same purpose, and even more convincingly.
Garcia rolled up in the BMW a few minutes later. We drove back up the valley and across the bleak mountain pastures to a spot I had selected earlier, just beyond a cattle grid. I parked the car so that the headlights illuminated the field of operations and gave Garcia careful advance instructions. When we opened the boot, Clive looked a very Sorry Rabbit indeed, lying there on the plastic sheeting, his co-ordinated leisurewear steeped in his own urine. I cut through the tape binding his ankles, knees and arms. I replaced his key-holder in his pocket, minus the Yale front-door key I’d retained, and motioned to Garcia to help me lift him out of the car. When we laid him down in the road he showed the first sign of life so far, moving his limbs feebly like a clockwork soldier in need of rewinding.
We picked him up and frog-marched him off the unfenced road and across the adjacent wilderness to the top of a steep slope overlooking a marshy depression at the end of the upper reservoir. There we stopped, holding him by one arm each. He made no attempt to struggle. I loosened the sponge-bag from around his throat and looked expectantly at Garcia. Then I plucked off Clive’s hood, and in the same moment we heaved him forward over the edge of the slope. He fell without a cry, rolling head over heels, arms and legs flailing uselessly until the darkness below swallowed him up.
The return journey passed uneventfully. It was shortly after midnight when we reached the pub where I had picked Garcia up that morning. I handed him a sealed envelope containing the sum we had agreed on. He counted it carefully. I then outlined the true nature of the events in which he had just participated, and explained that in the eyes of the law he was an accessory to murder. This resulted in a prolonged outburst of unpleasantness in the course of which aspersions were cast upon the legitimacy of my birth, the virility of my anonymous father was openly derided, and it was further alleged that my mother habitually engaged in unnatural practices involving donkeys, goats and — I found this a bit far-fetched — vultures. For his final sally Garcia switched to English.
‘You drop me into it, you bloody heel!’
‘You were already in it, amigo. But if you shut up and move fast, this will get you out.’
He stuffed the cash into his pocket and climbed out of the car, slamming the door behind him. I never saw him again, but I eventually learned from Trish that he had disappeared from the school the following week. This had aroused no particular comment. Garcia’s precarious situation was by now notorious, and everyone assumed that he had fled without warning in an attempt to throw the human rights hounds off the scent. In any case, no one at the Oxford International Language College cared much what had happened to Garcia by then. They were too absorbed in the latest twists and turns of the real-life soap opera starring their very own principal, Mr Clive Phillips.
I had one more chore to attend to before going home. This involved driving across town to the up-market Victorian property on the side of Headington Hill where Clive lived. The lower floor was dark, but a light showed in one of the bedrooms and another from a small window in the roof. I parked the BMW some distance away, slipped on my rubber gloves and made my way back on foot. The gate had been stolen or vandalized. I walked up the tiled path to the front door. From the nearby Cowley Road came whoops of drunken revelry. I got out the Yale key I had removed from Clive’s holder and tried it in the lock. It went in all right, but it wouldn’t turn.
I almost wept. After all I’d been through, I just couldn’t handle this. Then a light suddenly came on in the hallway. The front door consisted of a semi-transparent sheet of ornamented glass through which I could now make out a flight of stairs. I followed the path round the corner of the house and hid in the shadows. A moment later the door opened. It didn’t immediately close again, however. Instead, there ensued a leave-taking whose ardour and duration made the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet look like a skinhead kiss-off. About a quarter of an hour passed before Romeo reluctantly dug his bike out of the bushes and took off. Juliet bolted the front door and ran upstairs to weep in her pillow.
It was the sound of the bolt that did it. Surely Clive wouldn’t be best pleased if he returned home unexpectedly to find the door bolted against him? So maybe that wasn’t the door he used. Maybe the front door was for the lodgers, while Clive retained a separate entrance to which he alone possessed the key. I followed the path along the side of the house. Sure enough, it ended at a door near the rear of the premises. This too was fitted with a Yale lock, and the key turned in it.
I switched on the lights and started to search the flat. The front hallway of the original house had been narrowed into a mere passageway leading from the front door to the stairs and the rented rooms upstairs, while the original sitting and dining rooms together with an extension containing a modern kitchen and bathroom had been retained for Clive’s personal use. I’d been expecting fake-fur rugs and see-through cocktail cabinets, recessed strobe lights and a sunken Jacuzzi. The stud’s stable, in short. Clive Phillips will be standing tonight. Service while you wait. Instead, it looked like a student’s crash-pad. Clive was the next best thing to a millionaire, yet he’d been living in virtual squalor.
Then I saw the photo. It was a framed enlargement, sitting on a table which Clive had used as a desk. It was not a recent shot. Karen was sitting on a wooden bench, squinting slightly in the bright sunlight. She looked prettier than I had ever seen her, younger too, almost a different person. I had been obliged on several occasions to look through the Parsons’ photographic archive, all sixteen volumes of it, but I had never seen this picture before.
‘Clive?’
The door of the living room opened as though of its own accord.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not Clive.’
On the threshold stood Juliet, poised for flight.
‘I’m a friend of Clive’s,’ I told her, smiling nicely. ‘He knows I’m here. Look, he gave me the key.’
She was in her early twenties, the ideal clarity of her teenage beauty already slightly compromised by the gravity of the adult she would become.
‘I see lights on. I will telephone to the police, but then I think maybe he is come back before.’
‘Good for you. The thing is, Clive’s in a spot of trouble. There are one or two things he has here, documents and so on, which he doesn’t want falling into the wrong hands. So he asked me to come round and pick them up for him.’
‘Why he doesn’t come himself?’
‘He can’t, darling. He just hasn’t got a window free for anybody.’
I picked up a pile of papers from the table as though these might be the incriminating documents I had come to remove. I noticed Juliet staring suspiciously at my rubber gloves. I held them out to her, strangler fashion.
‘I’m not supposed to be here. Understand? I’ve never been here. No one has ever been here. Above all, no one has taken anything away. This is very important. Otherwise Clive will be sent to prison for a very long time. I’m sure your family wouldn’t want you involved in anything like that, now would they?’
Her solemn face swung from side to side in fervent negation.
‘Now then, do you happen to know where the phone is? I need to make a quick call, let Clive know everything’s all right.’
She led me into the next room and pointed out the combined phone and answering machine. While I pretended to dial, I extracted the tape cassette from the machine and slipped it into my pocket. I put the phone down.
‘No answer. He must have gone to bed. Which is where you should be, young lady.’
I left Clive’s key on the hall table and walked Juliet back to the front of the house.
‘Remember,’ I told her, ‘not a word to anybody!’
She nodded seriously. I was pretty sure I could depend on her not to talk. The trusting child thought that poor Clive’s fate was in her hands. As it was, indeed, although not in quite the way she believed.