A Shock to the System (24 page)

And Graham knew that if anything went wrong, he would have no hesitation in killing her. More than that, he would take pleasure in doing it.

Another look at the clock. 11:54. Time.

He gently disengaged Stella's arms from his body. She shuddered and rolled over to lie on her back. The vibration with each breath now took on the rasp of a snore. He tugged the duvet from under her, producing no reaction, and covered her with it.

He dressed quickly in the old jeans, shirt, pullover and sports shoes he had left in readiness behind the chair.

Stella did not stir.

He went across to the clock radio and, with one finger on ‘Time', pressed the ‘Hour' button through twenty-two numbers. When the display read ‘9.59 p.m.', he released the buttons.

He moved across to the side of the bed and switched off the light. The click did not change the heavy rhythm of Stella's sleep.

He slipped out of the front door and walked the quarter mile to where he had parked the Vauxhall Chevette.

By nine minutes past twelve, he was on his way, driving out of London in a south-westerly direction.

He took the A3 to Milford, and thence the A286 through Haslemere and Midhurst to Chichester. There was very little traffic about at that time of night, but even on the good bits of dual carriageway he did not exceed sixty. It was not a night to do anything that would attract attention.

He made good time, and a little before half-past one turned off the A27, following the sign to Bosham and Bosham Hoe. He turned again for the quay and parked up a side street. The back walls of gardens gave him some protection from curious insomniacs, and he avoided the exposure and double yellow lines of the main thoroughfare. Again, he did not wish to have the success of his great transgression jeopardised by some minor infringement.

Before he got out of the car, he checked the breast pockets of his shirt. New padlock key, a tube of glue, some small strips of sandpaper, a selection of knives, gimlets and screwdrivers. And a box of Swan Vestas matches.

He pulled the waders and torch over from the back seat and got out of the car. He closed the door and locked it.

Immediately his nose caught the seaweedy smell of exposed mud. Please God, to his surprise he found himself praying, please God may I have read the Tide Table right.

If he had, the timing for his adventure was ideal. High water at Portsmouth that evening had been at 18.27. It was neap tide; a spring would have been better, he reflected, but you can't have everything. According to his reckoning, adding the specified time difference for Bosham (five minutes for a neap tide), low water would be about quarter to two in the morning.

He took off his right shoe and started to pull on one of the waders. He leant against the car to do so. No lights shone in the side street. There was very little moon, the sky cloudy. All he could hear was the susurration of the invisible sea, and a distant incessant rattling, which at first he could not identify but then recognised as the banging of metal halyards against the masts of boats.

As he pushed his foot into the wader, the studs of its sole rasped on the tarmac surface of the road. No, not here. Someone might hear the clatter of his footsteps. Carefully he withdrew his foot and replaced the shoe. Eliminate unnecessary risks, that was what he must do. Just keep calm, and eliminate unnecessary risks.

He rounded the corner into the main street, and he could see the creek ahead. The seaweedy smell was stronger, the chattering of the halyards louder. A few lights shone on the opposite side, others on boats winked as they moved in the swell. A notice warned him that the road was liable to tidal flooding.

He moved left across the shingle, trying to remember where
Tara's Dream
was moored. On the previous occasion, of course, he and Robert had been in the dinghy and rowed round from the quay. But he remembered how he had looked back wistfully at the shore and tried to reverse that bearing. He kept looking back to the picture window he had seen then and trying to reproduce his point of view.

His shoes sounded softly on the shingle. Again he was glad he had not yet donned the waders. Eliminate risk. He was glad he hadn't used the torch yet either. His eyes were accustoming well to the gloom.

He looked back to the frontage of houses. A light shone from one upstairs window, but that had been on when he arrived. No cause for anxiety. His eyes knew rather than saw where the picture window was. The angle of his advance seemed correct.

Ahead of him the outline of a boat took shape. Beached by the ebbing tide, she listed slightly, held upright by props. She had the hunched shoulders look of a sailing boat with a cabin. The shape was deliciously familiar.

He felt a surge of confidence. Everything was going to work. And the boat was right out of the water. He wouldn't even need the waders.

He drew closer, but the meagre moonlight was inadequate. He risked the flash of the torch against the nameplate on the prow.

Kittiwake III.

He reeled in sudden panic, whirling round. The darkness offered no other comforting outlines.

His heart thumped and he felt dizzy. For a moment he contemplated turning back. There was no need for it to be done that night. He'd have plenty of other opportunities to get at Robert Benham. Or perhaps, the idea came to him suddenly, there was no need to do it at all.

This thought tasted at once seductive and traitorous. For a moment it invaded his whole mind. Forget the last couple of months, the old man's death, Merrily's death, thank his good fortune that both crimes had gone undetected, and leave it at that. Don't push your luck, Graham.

For a few seconds he was almost convinced, but then he felt a growing emptiness inside him. He had lost the job he wanted, he was without wife and children. On that evening's showing with Stella, he was now impotent. If he removed the excitement of murder from his life, what would be left? Killing could still make him feel power, still provide him with an ecstatic sense of his own identity.

No, to give up now would be cowardice. Worse than that it would be laziness, lack of tenacity, capitulating the first moment the going got difficult. Come on, you must do it, he reprimanded himself piously. Remember how neatly you disposed of Merrily. You're good. Come on, Graham, you're good.

His breathing calmed to a steady rhythm. He suppressed a panicky query as to how steadily Stella was breathing at that moment. If he started to think of the risks he was taking, he might as well give up straight away.

He moved slowly round the hull of
Kittiwake III.
His right foot landed in the pool of water that had formed around her keel. The ground was getting squelchy underfoot. He leant his back against the weedy hull and pulled on the waders, buckling the straps to his belt. His shoes he left neatly beside the boat like slippers under a bed.

Then he dared to look ahead. Of course there were more boats there. He shouldn't have panicked. Of course he'd find
Tara's Dream.

He looked back, sensing the outline of the houses and the position of the picture window. He still seemed to be on course. Two other boats lay one each side of him, but their outlines were wrong; one was a motor launch, the other a huge dinghy. But there was something else ahead.

This boat was shifting and swaying as it felt the tug of the tide. The keel was still grounded at the front, but the boat's stern twitched.

Graham flashed his torch, again to be disappointed.
Spray Queen.

But there was another shape just beyond that moved more regularly, responding to the ripples of the sea and the drag of its mooring chain. Graham's eyes strained to prise apart the darkness, but he couldn't be sure.

He moved forward slowly. Each raised footstep made a sucking sound as it left the mud. He stepped into the water till it tickled at the wader's ankles.

Then he flashed the torch.

Tara's Dream.
He had found her.

The boat was definitely afloat, only some two metres away from him. Graham looked at his watch. 1.54. He wished he had understood the Tide Table better and knew whether the water was still receding or had started to rise.

But he couldn't worry about that. Having got so close, he would complete the job. In ten minutes he reckoned he could be on his way back. He stepped forward.

He was surprised by the power of the current that dragged at his legs, but he managed to keep his balance. He was also surprised by how quickly the ground shelved. And by how much further away the boat was than it had at first appeared.

He concentrated hard on the placement of his feet. He tried shuffling, but the mud was too sticky, so he had to risk the lift of each foot and subsequent moment of imbalance. His pullover felt suffocatingly hot; sweat dribbled down his sides to the top of his trousers.

At last he had one hand on the side of the boat and felt the stippled effect of its non-slip surface under his fingers. It was then he remembered that he had not brought his rubber gloves.

But nothing was going to stop him now. He threw the torch into the boat, hearing it clatter on the wooden boards within, then moved round to the stern, where the vessel was lowest in the water. The top of the transom was at chest height, the water level round his knees, though it splashed higher.

The first attempt to heave himself up failed. His body slipped back, raising a spout of spray between the hull and his chest. He felt the shock of the water's coldness and tasted salt on his tongue. Damp trickled over the top of his waders.

The second attempt succeeded. He jerked the weight of his body over the transom and, in an ungainly scramble of flailing legs, slid down into the well of the boat.

Swivelling his body round, he lay on his back, with his feet still over the side. He was about to bring them in, when he was halted by a caution. Muddy footsteps all over the clean fibreglass and bottom-boards were not the kind of signature he wanted to leave on the job. He unbuckled the straps from his belt and slid his legs out with some difficulty. He left the waders flat with their feet dangling over the transom.

When he stood up, the boat's movement brought immediate queasiness. In his state of hypertension, nausea seemed dangerously close. That really would do it, to leave a neat little pool of vomit as a calling-card. He forced control on himself and reached under the damp pullover to the key in the breast pocket of his shirt.

God, if it didn't fit, after all this . . . He tottered forward to the cabin hatch and felt for the padlock with his right hand. His left hand trembled so much that he couldn't guide the key into its socket. He dropped it and had to scrabble through the bottom-boards by torchlight. He was careful to switch off the torch before the beam rose above the side of the boat. Eliminate risk.

Imposing calmness, he approached the padlock again. The key slid into its aperture and clicked home. He turned it. Another click, and the padlock sprang open.

Graham felt a deep peace. It would be all right. It was all going to work, after all.

He pushed back the sliding hatch at the top, gently, then lifted out the vertical wooden section. With a surge of comfort, he realised that his memory of how the opening worked had been accurate.

Now he felt relaxed. Steady against the rocking boat, he turned back for the torch and then stepped down into the cabin.

The tiny windows were curtained, so he felt safe to use the torch. Keeping its beam low, he made a quick survey of the cramped space. Forward, the recess with its four bunks was illuminated. He drew across the thick curtain which separated this from the tiny galley area. The torch beam passed across the folding table, nylon sail bags and the two hot-plates fixed over the curtained space where the Calor Gas cylinder was stored.

He directed the torch to the hatch above his head. It was as he had remembered. The fibreglass top slid back and forth on wooden rails.

It was perfect.

He slid the hatch backwards and forwards experimentally. Then, with all the time in the world, he selected one of his strips of sandpaper and glued it along the underside edge of the hatch, just above the rail. He closed the hatch and marked a point on the rail a couple of inches in front of the sandpaper.

Pushing the hatch forward again, he got out his gimlet and, from above, drilled a neat hole in the rail where he had marked it. He slid the hatch back to check the alignment. It was right.

He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out the box of Swan Vestas matches.

As he felt it a new, cold horror struck him. The cardboard was damp and soft to the touch. He snatched it open and struck a match against the side of the box. Nothing. Maybe it was just the abrasive surface that was wet. He tried a match against one of his own dry pieces of sandpaper. Nothing. He tried another, and another, and another.

‘Fuck it! Fuck it!' he screamed in childlike frustration. He dropped the matches, and sank to the floor of the galley, weeping.

It was a look at his watch that finally brought him to his senses. 2.17. He must either sort something out or get away quickly. If Robert Benham arrived next morning for a day's sailing and found his office rival in
Tara's Dream
, it would not look good.

Robert Benham. Robert Benham was of course hyperefficient. He was the sort of man who would ensure that his boat contained all requisite stores.

Graham straightened out of his crumpled heap of self-pity and moved across to the gas rings.

Good old Robert. There, tucked behind the blue metal frame lay not one, but two boxes of Swan Vestas matches. One match on its own wobbled sideways in the hole he had drilled. Two stayed, but didn't feel very secure. Three, however, jammed in, tight and unshifting.

He moved the hatch back gingerly, but the matches stood too proud. He took them out and cut them down to the right length. The matchheads almost touched the underside of the hatch. They would definitely touch the sandpaper as it was pushed over them.