A Shock to the System (15 page)

The proceedings were short. The Coroner called a variety of witnesses. A doctor gave the evidence of the post-mortem on Merrily's little body. A statement by Emma was read out. Lilian described her arrival at the house on Emma's summons and the policeman, whom she in turn had called, stated what he had found. The electrician who had surveyed the house for rewiring confirmed his views of its lethal state. The Coroner regretted this terrible tragedy to a young family, spoke of the need for constant awareness of the dangers of superannuated electrical systems, and a verdict of accidental death was recorded.

Graham Marshall had cleared another huge hurdle.

The cremation had been set up in advance; only the Coroner's verdict was required before the arrangements could proceed.

It was fixed for the following day. Lilian scoured the house for black and kitted out herself and the children like something from a Dickens serial on BBC-2. Graham wore a light suit and a black knitted tie. He tried to keep the bounce out of his step as he walked from the hearse to the crematorium chapel.

It was as he would have wished it. Clean, anonymous, functional. It reminded him of the hotel in Brussels where he had been only ten days before.

The officiating clergyman also achieved anonymity. His short address made no secret of the fact that he had never met Merrily. Her virtues were generalised, her identity withdrawn into platitude.

The turnout was small. Beyond the family, the odious Vivvi and a couple of other representatives of Merrily's gynaecological Mafia had come, but none of their husbands had deemed the occasion worth a day's leave.

At the back of the chapel Charmian sniffed quietly, alone. She had tried to greet Lilian, but her mother had cut her dead, shepherding the children away from their aunt as if from a flasher in the park.

Lilian and Emma also snuffled throughout the service. Henry remained balefully impassive. Graham managed a few coughs and throat-clearings that could have been interpreted as emotion and which contained the exhilaration inside him.

At the appointed moment the anonymous curtains slowly closed on the futile expense of the pale pine coffin. When they slowly reopened, the ponderous conjuring trick was done. The coffin had vanished, consigned to the fierce blue gas jets within.

And Merrily was gone. A powdering of ash to be scattered. More plantfood for the roses in the Garden of Remembrance.

The feeling of power surged through Graham like lust.

The few friends shook hands with the family outside, murmuring stock condolences. No arrangements had been made for a drink afterwards and none seemed required. Vivvi and her coven drifted away.

Charmian was the last out of the chapel. She had spent a moment repairing her make-up. The tears were gone, but she was still in the grip of deep emotion.

Lilian bridled instantly at the sight of her prodigal daughter. ‘Come on, Emma. Henry. We must be moving.' She started towards the car. Then turned back to her son-in-law.

‘Graham.'

‘I'll be along in a moment.'

Lilian's parting sniff contained more affront than suffering. Charmian looked at her brother-in-law. The grey eyes were full of pain, but had not lost their knowing quality. He felt a strange bond with her, an urge to confide, to tell her what he had done, in some obscure expectation of praise.

But he said nothing, just her name. ‘Charmian.'

The grey eyes still held his stare. They disconcerted him. They seemed to see too much. He looked down at the ground, conscious of a scuff-mark on one of her black patent shoes. ‘Graham, I want to talk to you. It's very important.'

‘Yes?'

‘Yes,' said Charmian. ‘It's about Merrily's death.'

‘My feelings about Merrily are complex. Always have been. Now she's dead they are even more confused.'

Graham's eyes wandered round Charmian's living-room as she spoke. It was the evening of the cremation. He had left Lilian to settle the children and gone out without specifying his destination. Deviousness, covering his tracks, was becoming a habit.

His flickering glances took in the dark brown paint, the loaded pine bookshelves, the terra cotta plant pots suspended in harnesses of knotted string, the giant floor cushions, the hand-woven rugs on the wall. It was all yesterday's trends, dating from the time when Charmian was at her most successful, when pop journalists were being snapped up as feature writers, when she had had a regular column in one of the Sundays. She had been married then, too. The house had been a mutual project, the work of a pair of London trendsetters. But now the marriage and the column were long gone. Charmian survived as a freelance journalist, spreading her net ever wider to increasingly obscure publications as the impetus of her reputation slowed. If she had not received the house as part of the divorce settlement, her life would be precarious; as it was, she was safe but not affluent. Her surroundings reflected this. The paintwork was a little battered, there was too much dust, the windowpanes wore a filter of grime.

Through the front windows Graham could see the spiked railings that protected the steps down to the basement. He had a quick image of a body impaled on them, one viscously gleaming point emerging from the stretched bulk of clothes. Anyone who jumped from the upstairs window would land like that. So would anyone who was pushed.

Pleasing fantasies of murder methods were now part of the regular stock of his thoughts. His imaginative life, he felt, had been considerably enriched since he became a murderer. Railings, yes, good. With comparable satisfaction he noted the tangle of wires and adaptors that fed the randomly assembled stereo components. He didn't want to repeat himself, but the set-up offered plenty of opportunities for electrical accidents.

It was all hypothetical, of course. Casual conjecture. He was merely making a professional assessment of the situation and its possibilities. At the moment he had no reason to kill Charmian. It rather depended on what she felt such urgency to discuss with him.

He concentrated his mind on her analysis of the relationship she had had with her sister.

‘It's an awful thing to admit, particularly of someone so recently dead, but I never liked her.'

Graham offered no reaction, and Charmian continued, ‘Obviously childhood recollections are all mixed up and it's hard to disentangle my feelings for Merrily from those I have for my mother. I think I turned against Lilian when our father walked out, when I was about twelve. We never got on after that. I just became increasingly aware of her selfishness and affectation. And Merrily seemed to get daily more like her. I'm sorry, but I thought my late sister was a profoundly silly woman.'

Graham was surprised to discover how closely her view coincided with his, but recollection of his bereaved status prevented him from endorsing it. He bided his time. He still wasn't sure where Charmian's discourse was leading and, until he was, felt mildly apprehensive.

‘The fact is,' Charmian continued, ‘I often wanted Merrily dead.' Graham did not comment. ‘It's only now she
is
dead that I can recognise the violence of my feelings. I thought I just disliked her; in fact I hated her. And if I knew who caused her death I'd like to shake him by the hand and thank him.' Graham tensed, but with her next words the danger passed. ‘Oh, that's metaphorical, but it is what I feel. I know I'm taking a risk talking to you like this, Graham. You were married to Merrily, you must be in a terrible state, and perhaps you don't want to hear her abused. But I need to say these things to you.'

‘Why?' He bleached the monosyllable of intonation. ‘Because I have to know whose side you're on.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Listen, my mother fucked my life up completely. I think if my marriage had worked, if I could have had children of my own, I might have been able to break free of her influence. As it is, I'm stuck, a menopausal divorcee, full of hatred.

‘She also destroyed Merrily. Not in the same way, because I resisted and Merrily never resisted, but quite as completely. She destroyed Merrily by absorption, by making her into a facsimile of Lilian Hinchcliffe. And I'm glad Merrily died before she could repeat the process on her own children.'

She paused, momentarily exhausted by the outburst, and looked at Graham for reaction. He did not know what response to give. He was surprised; he had feared suspicions about the circumstances of Merrily's death, but never anticipated this statement of sisterly revulsion. Also he found himself in more or less complete agreement with Charmian, though he was wary of confessing it.

He looked blank and confused, which he was, and once again a favourable construction was put on his lack of emotion.

‘I'm sorry, Graham, I'm being stupid and insensitive. Showing a sense of timing almost as crass as my mother's. Oh God, I keep recognising bits of her in me! I've tried to suppress them, blot them out, but they're still there. I sometimes wish they could be cut out by surgery, that I could just go into hospital for a few weeks and come out a normal person.'

He waited for the end of this spasm of self-hatred before he spoke. ‘I still don't understand why you're saying all this. You said you wanted to know whose side I'm on. I'd like to know what the alternatives are.'

‘All I'm asking is: do you like Lilian?'

It did not require a lot of thought to answer that one.

‘Right. Good. Which means you're on my side.'

‘I still don't understand, Charmian.'

‘There are no half-measures with Lilian, no truces, no alliances. Either you're for her or against her.'

‘Well, we've established where I stand.'

‘Yes. So my next question is: Do you want her looking after your children, repeating what she did to Merrily and me in another generation? She's already started on Emma, I could see that at the cremation, already she's training her into a “little woman”, teaching her the rules of alternating blackmail and collapse, the system of militant pathos by which she's always run her own life. God knows what effect she'll have on Henry, but I can't think that it'll be for the good.'

‘No.'

‘So do you really want her to look after them?'

‘No, of course not. It isn't settled yet, what'll happen to them. Obviously, it's going to be difficult for me, being at work most of the time, you know . . .'

‘Yes. Listen, Graham, I have a proposition to put to you. Let me look after the children. Let them come here to live with me.'

‘Charmian –'

She raised a hand. ‘No, hear me out.' Which was just as well. It wouldn't do for him to accept the offer with too much alacrity. He should hear out her justifications, make some pretence of assessing the proposition. It didn't look good for a new widower to abandon his children with too much enthusiasm.

‘Graham, I know some of my motives may be suspect. I know I was jealous of Merrily having children and no doubt I want to take hers over because I will never have any of my own. Also my career's not going well, and maybe I fancy the option of doing less and staying at home to look after children. And I don't know how good I'll be at it. The only things I do know for certain are that I love the children and that, whatever I do, being brought up by me will do them less harm than being brought up by Lilian Hinchcliffe.'

Graham's mind was working fast. This was better than he had dared hope. If Charmian took the children off his hands, then he could sell the Boileau Avenue house and buy the service flat he so yearned for. With Merrily's death, the mortgage would be paid off, so whatever he got for the house would be pure profit. Of course, if Charmian was going to give up work, he would have to support her, have to pay her maintenance for the kids . . .

Her voice broke into his calculations. ‘I'm sorry, Graham. I'm going too fast. I shouldn't have rushed in. You need time to think about it. Or perhaps you think what I'm suggesting would break up your family completely . . .'

He gave a little, confused shake of his head.

‘Perhaps you think I should be offering to come to the house, as a kind of housekeeper. But I can't see that working, Graham.'

‘No.' His voice still sounded puzzled.

‘I can't really see us as a foursome,' she continued with her customary bluntness. ‘I'm just talking about the children.'

‘Yes. I understand that.' But he didn't sound as if he understood.

‘Sorry. I shouldn't have barged in like this. Maybe you don't want Henry and Emma to leave the house. Maybe you'd rather get in some sort of professional housekeeper . . .'

Oh no, that sounds expensive, thought Graham. His mind was absolutely made up, but the scene, he knew, required some token prevarication.

‘I'm sorry, it's a bit sudden . . .'

He looked at Charmian. The grey eyes were tense, dependent on his response.

What she had offered made excellent sense from every point of view. She had a core of common sense which the rest of the family lacked, and her current feud with her mother was bound to minimise Lilian's influence.

Once again he felt the strange need to confide in her, to confess his murder – no, he wasn't doing himself justice – his
two
murders. He felt a need for outside commendation. Again he missed his parents. He knew it was idiotic, but he wanted to phone them, to hear their impressed and reverent silence as he described his latest success. In his parents' absence, Charmian seemed the most likely person to give him the reaction he needed.

He felt very drawn to her. Sex played no part in the attraction. Sex was now a vague recollection from his past, like a journey walked daily to school, presumably important at the time, but instantly forgotten once discontinued.

Charmian's grey eyes looked sympathetic. She had said she always hated Merrily. She had said she would like to shake her sister's killer by the hand. Graham wanted to see the eyes light up with surprise and admiration when he told her of his achievement.