He was surprised to realize that he felt no disgust, no terror and no distress. There was just a vast freedom, as though he’d launched off some rocks to swim in a gloriously empty warm sea.
How could I ever have been so frightened of him? Toby wondered, remembering the days when the sound of Ben’s voice had sent him scurrying to the basement to hide.
There’ll be time for that later, he told himself.
He knew he must be practical now. There would probably be some of Ben’s blood on him, even if he couldn’t see it, and he’d have to make sure it didn’t betray him. Forensic scientists could find the tiniest traces these days.
He thought of the soles of his shoes, too, as he walked with confident steps towards Mansion House. But he was sure he hadn’t trodden in any of the blood, so he couldn’t be leaving a trail that way. And he was carrying the umbrella straight out in front of him, holding it by the middle of the shaft so that the ferrule couldn’t trail any of Ben’s blood or brains on to the pavement if there were any traces he hadn’t managed to wipe off. No splatters on his coat would be visible in this weather, so long as he kept away from the street lights and away from the cars.
For the first time in weeks, Toby was glad to know there’d be no one at home. He’d be able to burn everything that might be contaminated with Ben’s bodily fluids. He wouldn’t be caught out by forensic scientists finding blood splatters on any of his clothes. Of course, the clothes would have to wait until he’d dealt with the umbrella. Obviously that had to go first.
He thought of Peter’s voice in the old days telling him that whatever anyone suspected, they couldn’t touch him without proof or a confession. Good memories of Peter would see him through this, just as the man himself had seen him through the original fear of discovery, and through the amoebic dysentery. Peter was, and always would be now, his friend.
Toby lifted the umbrella a little further up, to look affectionately at the ferrule. Who would have thought something so ordinary could have been such a life saver? He thought even more affectionately of his father who had given him this most priceless piece of information. It made up for a lot that he hadn’t been able to give.
Now, at last, Toby had crossed the line from victimhood
to power. The world would be a better place without Ben. Cleaner, too.
Toby had reached the steps up to Southwark Bridge. He paused again, waiting to make sure no one was following him. For the first time he realized that Ben might have brought someone else to watch his back at the rendezvous he must have planned in the tunnel this evening.
There were no sounds of pursuit and when Toby turned casually, looking first at the pavement as though he’d dropped something, he checked the street and saw no sign of anyone either. Perhaps Ben’s contempt had been such that he’d never realized he’d need a bodyguard for a meeting with the despised Toby Fullwell. Even if he had, there wasn’t much any of them could do now. Ben was dead and, criminals themselves, his friends could hardly demand help from the police.
Reaching home at last, Toby almost skipped up the first few steps. He could have been alone in the fog, he thought as he took his time finding his front-door keys, and he liked it now.
There were no more ships to be heard on the river. Even the cars seemed to be avoiding the bridge tonight. His keys clattered against the phone in his pocket as he pulled them out. Opening the door and punching in the alarm code was automatic; he didn’t even have to turn on the hall light to do it. He walked up the dark staircase to his office on the first floor at the back.
There was an open fireplace there with a working chimney, the only one that was ever used. Smoke in any of the other parts of the gallery might have damaged the paintings, and open fires would have been much too boring for Margaret to have to clean in the flat.
The insurance company hadn’t liked the idea of even this hearth being used in such a building and quoted a vast extra premium because of it. Toby had managed to persuade the trustees that it was necessary to have actual flames, as a way of welcoming important visitors and showing them what the
house would have been like in its heyday. He’d negotiated a small discount with the insurers to save his face and then had the most beautiful chain-mail curtains made to draw across the whole fireplace whenever the room was to be left unattended while the fire was burning.
Up in the office, he turned on the overhead light and took off all his clothes, leaving them in a heap on the tiled hearth. The shutters were already properly secured so he didn’t have to worry about any of the neighbours looking in. He was surprised to find himself so calm. He hadn’t felt as well as this for months. His mind was clear, and he knew exactly what he had to do.
There was a small radio on the desk. He turned it on to Radio 4 and was gratified to hear
The Archers
. He hadn’t realized how late it was. Nigel and Elizabeth were having another tense marital spat, which made him feel better, too. Nothing in the world had changed outside the circle of his relationship to Ben, and no one would have any idea what had happened. Life – for everyone except Ben, of course – would go on just as it always had.
Toby built his fire in the grate as meticulously as he knew how, until real flames were flickering up around the nasty smokeless briquettes. That made him think of the neighbours and wonder whether they would notice illicit smoke billowing out of his chimneys. Not in the fog, surely. But just in case someone did see and wondered, it might be a good idea to burn some wood.
Even under the clean air act, you were allowed to burn household waste, he thought. And there was an old tea chest downstairs. Tinder dry, it would make the fire burn even more effectively and if anyone ever came asking questions about the smoke, he could show them the metal sides and screws of the tea chest.
Cracking up the tea chest was good fun. First the paper lining went on the fire, scattering the last few tea leaves it had once protected. They’d be useful evidence, too, if anyone ever came
looking for clues here. He dismantled the metal sides and then broke up the thin, inflammable wood panels. Once they were properly alight they generated plenty of heat, so he hardly noticed that he was naked.
‘Hardly,’ he said aloud, chortling, ‘or barely.’
Now that the fire was burning merrily, he began to dismantle the umbrella. This would be a long job, he knew, but it was important to do it properly. He fetched a small pair of very sharp scissors from the pencil pot on the desk and snipped the stitching that held the black nylon material round each spoke. Underneath the material, he found the join between the dull black spokes themselves and their shiny caps. They weren’t at all difficult to pull apart. He put the rounded gleaming ends in a new envelope with no betraying address written on it. The sharp spokes themselves would go into a John Lewis plastic bag, which also bore no personal identification.
Opening the umbrella to dismantle the mechanism that lifted the spokes gave him a pang of old-style angst. It was supposed to be unlucky to have an open umbrella indoors. Then he chuckled again, amazed at the toughness of his new self.
Toby tried to remember that he had just killed Ben, that a once-breathing, talking, living man was dead in a pool of blood because of him, but it didn’t mean anything more than confirmation of his own strength.
Maybe Margaret
was
right and he had gone mad. If so, he couldn’t think why he’d fought so hard against the idea for so long. This was great. If this were madness, then give him madness every time. Ben Smithlock had not deserved to live. That was all there was to it. Who was it who’d said that ‘moral is what you feel good after’? Hemingway, could it have been? Toby couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter.
The Archers
had moaned and comforted each other into silence, to be replaced by Mark Lawson and
Front Row.
It was ages since the producers had asked Toby on to
Front Row.
Somehow, subtly, he’d have to remind them of his existence without looking as though he was begging for work. It would never do for the powerful player he’d discovered beneath his anxieties to beg.
Now the umbrella was almost dismantled. The spokes lay neatly in their bag. He’d have to think of the best place to ‘lose’ them. He was left with the brass ferrule and the cup-like piece that had held the nylon in place, along with the gold band with his betraying initials. That had probably better go straight into the river. Even if the river police ever dragged the bottom for evidence, they weren’t likely to come up with something as small as that, or know what it was if they did. After all, they sometimes turned up whole bodies they could never identify.
The fire was still burning nicely. He put the wooden shaft of the umbrella across his knees to break it. It wouldn’t move. All he got from his efforts was a bruise. Still, he thought he looked rather wonderful in the flickering firelight, half kneeling like someone’s statue of Vulcan. He’d never noticed how dark and thickly curling his pubic hair looked. Somewhere in the house, there must be a hacksaw. Even a pair of heavy pruning shears might do it. In the meantime, he’d better start burning the clothes so as not to waste the fire’s heat.
Margaret’s dressmaking shears were sharp and heavy enough to deal easily with the overcoat, but he was surprised at how many layers of different sorts of linings and waddings there were. Fine in a handmade coat, he thought, but not in something off the peg like this. No wonder it had cost such a fortune.
It took a long time to get the whole lot burned and he didn’t like to leave the fire to search for a hacksaw. While the coat was burning, he slit up the two pieces of his suit, his shirt, socks and underpants, adding small heaps of the resulting scraps whenever flames managed to get through the mass of overcoat pieces. He should have fed them in more slowly, he realized. But at last the flames began to take control back from the fabric pieces.
No wonder they’d always talked of fire as purifying. It was doing a grand job tonight. He’d have to think what to do with the ash, of course, but getting rid of that somewhere no one would ever link with him shouldn’t be beyond his new capabilities.
At last the scraps were all on the fire. The final few were still smouldering, so he drew the iron mesh curtains in front of the grate and went to find his hacksaw. Someone rang the front-door bell as he was halfway down the stairs. He hoped it would be one of the innumerable charity collectors, or perhaps a canvasser rather than someone like Henry. The bell rang again, followed by the sharp, imperious crack of the knocker.
Oh, shit, he thought as he hovered naked, covered in smuts, and indecisive on the stairs. What if they lifted the letter-box flap to peer inside the house? Could they see him from here? For a second he felt some of the old panic returning, then remembered the rules of vision and perspective. No one was going to be able to look up the stairs through a flap as low in the front door as his. One more ring sounded, then silence, then at last the flap of the letter box. He watched a small piece of white paper fluttering down and heard retreating footsteps.
‘The smoke,’ he muttered. ‘Could he have seen the smoke?’
Even if he had, whoever ‘he’ was, he might think it came from the boiler. As soon as Toby was sure there was no one ready to whip up the flap just as he was bending down to collect the note, he went to see what it was.
There was no envelope. He didn’t pick it up because he wasn’t sure when he planned to be known to be back in the house. But it was easy to see it was from Henry. Toby would have known those emphatic, confident black letters anywhere. On the side that lay uppermost, he could read:
‘ … and she’s worried, Toby. She asked me to come and talk to you. She said you assaulted Trish Maguire at the school play. I know Trish well, Toby, so you have embarrassed me as well as Margaret. What has been going on to make you
behave like this? Please phone as soon as you get in. We
need
to talk.’
Well fuck you, Henry, he thought. You can’t expect me to come running just because you’re embarrassed.
This was going to need some careful working out, he realized. Someone might easily have seen him come in this evening, so he’d better leave via the garage and quickly so that he could claim to have gone out before Henry arrived. On the other hand, it would be awful to run into Henry in one of the surrounding streets now. And he wasn’t ready to go out yet in any case. He still had the inflammable parts of the umbrella to burn, then he had to collect the ash in an airtight bag, then he had to clean the fireplace and then he had to clean himself. No, he couldn’t go out yet.
If there were ever any questions, he’d have to say he’d taken some strong painkillers to deal with a stress-induced headache after the scene at the school and fallen too deeply asleep to hear the front-door bell. They might well believe that, especially if he did take some pills to show up in any blood test.
Up in the bathroom, he found the Co-dydramol Margaret had been prescribed after her fibroids operation and took two, before speeding up his search for the hacksaw. If the pills were likely to make him sleepy, he wanted to have all the tricky parts of the job done before they acted. There was no sign of the hacksaw, but he did find a Stanley knife. That made reasonably quick work of the wooden shaft of the umbrella, and the two pieces he ended up with fitted neatly on top of his small fire. They burned well, too. Now it was just the nylon.
That was so thin he didn’t think it would need cutting up like the heavy overcoat so he dumped the whole lot on top of the fire, only to see the sodding stuff melt.
His courage deserted him. For a hideous second he thought he could hear laughter, but it was only the wind in the chimney. Wind! If there were wind strong enough to make that kind of noise, it would probably blow away the fog. He had to get this
done before the fog went and the next driver passing by found Ben’s body.