A Shock to the System (7 page)

Merrily was very put out for the rest of the evening. She made no secret of the fact that she felt her husband had let her down.

Simply to get her off that subject, Graham again raised the question of his having an affair. He denied it, with perhaps a little too much vehemence. And in bed he made love to her to convince her of his fidelity.

Again, perhaps with a little too much vehemence.

The events of the evening had suspended his fears about the murder, but they came back when he woke sweating at three in the morning. He soon gave up the hope of further sleep, and walked round the house to control the trembling of his body.

To give himself something to do, he looked at other electrical fittings and found what he had feared, the same old wiring with its perished insulation.

That added a new panic. He tried to recapture the nonchalance that being a murderer had sometimes given and ask himself how potentially lethal wiring could matter to a man who had taken the life of another, but it didn't work. He switched off the mains.

At eight-thirty, having shouted down the rest of the family's moans about the lack of light, radios, hot water and hot food, he rang an electrician, asking him to come round and say how serious the danger was.

The post then arrived, bearing a letter from his bank manager, complaining about the abuse of the Marshalls' overdraft ‘facility' and demanding a ‘remittance'.

While he was recovering from this blow, Lilian Hinchcliffe rang to say her little Fiat had a flat tyre. Would Graham be an angel and come round and fiddle with whatever needed fiddling with?

No, he bloody wouldn't. He curbed this response before he voiced it, but said unfortunately he couldn't because he was waiting in for the electrician, Lilian would have to get in touch with a tyre place and get the thing mended herself (like ordinary bloody people did). But they charged so much, Lilian whined, surely it wasn't a lot to ask for Graham to just come and have a little
look
at it. Very well, he'd see if he could get over later.

Merrily, who had gone up after their cold breakfast to dress, came down in the ragged T-shirt and patched jeans she wore for painting. Since they weren't ever going to have any money ever again, she announced, she'd better get used to their new style of life. The gesture was characteristic, particularly in its totally inappropriate timing.

As if this weren't enough, Emma, about to leave for school, said she felt funny, and turned out, on examination by Merrily, to have started, at the tender age of eleven, her first period.

Henry, uninformed by his father – or indeed anyone else – about such matters, did not understand and made some inapposite remark, which sent the two women (as they both now were) into floods of tears.

At this moment the doorbell rang. Graham would almost have welcomed a policeman come to arrest him, but it turned out to be the electrician.

Tight-lipped, Graham showed him round the house. The electrician fingered the odd wire that all too easily came out of the wall, tapped a few plugs and tutted over junction boxes. Then, with the understanding gravity of a cancer surgeon, he said the house was a deathtrap, and it would need complete rewiring, at a cost of one thousand four hundred pounds. Excluding V.A.T.

What about switching the power back on – would it be safe? The electrician shook his head dubiously. Well, he wouldn't like to be responsible. Still, have to take the risk till it was all properly done. What? No, he couldn't think about doing it for three weeks. Up to here he was. Oh yes, but no question it was urgent. Very urgent.

Graham Marshall thought of Stella with her little flat and no more weighty decision than which cinema to go to that evening.

He thought of Robert Benham, with his potential Head of Personnel's salary and his weekend trip to Miami.

He thought of himself, who, on top of everything else, was a murderer.

And he thought that at least, when you're in prison for life, you don't have any responsibilities.

Time continued to pass and for Graham Marshall the balance between peace and fear slowly changed. The panics still came, terrors could still clutch at him when least expected, but they did not come so often and they did not stay so long.

Murder, he began to think in moments of detachment, was like any other new experience. Like sex, maybe. The first time it seemed all-important, as if it would dominate the rest of one's life, but gradually it came to be accepted, even taken for granted. How many married men, he wondered, questioned on their way to work, could remember whether or not they'd made love to their wives the night before.

Sex only became an obsession when the impulse was unnaturally strong or when it was infected with guilt.

Continuing his analogy, he found that his impulse to murder was not unnaturally strong. Nor did he feel any guilt about the one that he had committed.

He sometimes wondered idly whether he'd feel any different if the victim were someone he knew.

Of course, the big distinction between sex and murder was that one wanted to make a habit of the first, and probably not of the second.

Graham Marshall certainly didn't. Three weeks after the event he still found the shock was sufficient to last him for a lifetime. And he would do anything to avoid the paralysing fear of discovery.

But that fear was receding. Increasingly logic told him he was going to get away with it.

Committing the murder had been a stroke of bad luck; getting arrested for it would be really appalling luck.

And, as the fear left him, his attitude to the crime changed. Previously he had not dared to examine his feelings, but now he found he kept coming back to the incident with something approaching relish.

It was not everyone who had committed a murder.

He began to feel a certain exclusivity. The crime gave his life an unpredictable dimension. It filled the void the loss of George Brewer's job had left in him.

The feeling was comparable to that he had felt in the old days at work when talking about Lilian's show-business friends or when unconventionally dressed: that there was more to Graham Marshall than met the eye.

Except, of course, he couldn't really tell his colleagues about the murder. It had to be his secret.

But it was a secret from which he drew strength. When Robert Benham was at his most patronising, when Merrily at her most precious, or Lilian at her most demanding, Graham Marshall would say to himself: ‘What you don't realise is that I am a murderer, that I have taken human life.'

And the thought gave him a sense of power.

‘And I bought the paddock too, because you could easily land a helicopter there.'

Graham laughed indulgently at the fancy, then realised from his host's face that Robert Benham wasn't joking. He didn't joke. When he said he'd bought the paddock adjacent to his cottage as a helipad, that was exactly why he had bought it. And for someone who had become Head of Personnel at Crasoco by the age of thirty-four, the idea of owning a helicopter was not fanciful.

With sudden clarity Graham realised the truth that had only been hinted at hitherto – that Robert Benham's ambition and potential did not stop at Crasoco, that Head of Personnel there was only another step on a staircase that would lead through many companies, ever onward and upward. Robert Benham was destined to lead the sort of life in which helicopters were necessary, the life of a real ‘success'. Even in ambition his new boss outstripped him. Graham felt diminished and parochial.

He searched for some comfort, as he always did when threatened, in his opponent's failings. Everyone has an Achilles' heel – a flaw of character, an awkward mannerism, a past failure, an ill-chosen mate, an unsuitable home – that can alleviate the pang of envy.

But in the case of Robert Benham, Graham could not find it. Certainly, judged on an absolute scale, the young man had moral shortcomings, but these were not of a kind to solace his rival. Rather the reverse, for Graham recognised his own qualities of efficiency and ruthlessness reflected with more intense concentration. Robert Benham shared his approach to life, but was better at it.

Benham's mannerisms, too, were hard to fault. The inadequacies which Graham had immediately identified on their first encounter had been proved by success to be more than adequate to the challenges they faced. What Eric Marshall would have described as ‘a common accent' and ‘lack of social graces' had proved positive advantages. Benham had been preferred over Graham for being, amongst other things, ‘more in touch with the work force'. And Robert's strong regional identity only increased the sense of rootlessness Graham had felt since his parents' deaths.

As to past failures, there seemed unfortunately to be no blots on the Benham
curriculum vitae.

Nor did his choice of accommodation let him down. Graham was prepared to take the Dolphin Square flat on trust; though he had not seen it, the address was sufficient to make him bitterly nostalgic for his own lost life in Kensington and Chelsea.

And what he was seeing at Stoughton denied him the opportunity of superiority. As the weekend approached, he had prepared a small armoury of pejoratives to describe the cottage. ‘Pokey', ‘run-down', ‘draughty', ‘primitive' and ‘damp' vied with ‘tarted-up', ‘precious', ‘chocolate-box' and ‘poncy' as his imagination shifted.

But the reality of the place blunted his weapons. The thatched roof, neat white paint and Tudor beams seen as Robert's Scirocco drew up outside on the Friday evening had given hope for ‘chocolate-box', but this had been denied by the building's imposing proportions. ‘Primitive' was rendered inapplicable by the neat Calor gas tank and the bright blue burglar alarm affixed under the eaves. Though its size and condition ruled out ‘pokey' and ‘run-down', as they entered the cottage Graham thought ‘draughty' might still be in with a chance, but this hope was quickly dashed by the blast of central heating and open fire that welcomed them. He toyed momentarily with ‘overheated' and ‘smoky', but was forced to reject them as inappropriate. ‘Tarted-up', ‘precious' and ‘poncy' met the same fate. It was just a very nice cottage, practical, skilfully modernised, well-equipped. Above reproach, even for such a skilled practitioner of reproach as Graham Marshall.

And any hope that Robert Benham's image might be shattered by a grotesquely unsuitable partner was dispelled as a girl issued from the kitchen to greet them.

Before he met her, Graham knew her primary attraction – that she was a girlfriend rather than a wife. The more he saw of Robert's life, the more he blamed the unfavourable comparison of his own on his ill-considered and premature marriage to Merrily. She was his handicap; she was the obstacle to the full realisation of his potential.

He felt this with redoubled force when he saw how beautiful the girlfriend was. Not only beautiful, but
famously
beautiful. He recognised her face from his television screen. The pale blue eyes and black hair identified Tara Liston, an English actress who had made it in the States and been reimported to her own country in an internationally successful detective series.

And Robert Benham actually possessed this creature who peopled the wet-dreams of the world. His recent weekend trip to Miami fell into place.

And Graham's last hope of comfort fell into oblivion.

What was more, Tara Liston proved to be charming. His defensive wishful thinking that she might turn out to be a bitch, might even give Robert a hard time, dissipated through the evening. She was delightful, entertaining and apparently deeply in love.

Graham made the mistake at one point of mentioning his mother-in-law's name, brandishing it as if to show his own association with the glamour of show business, in the way that had proved so successful in his early days at Crasoco. Tara was of course charming about it and, jutting out a dubious lower lip, said yes, she was sure she had heard the
name.
But Graham felt deflated and shabby, like a man name-dropping in a pub.

The dinner she cooked for them the first evening revealed no shortcoming in domestic skills, and an imagination that contrasted with Merrily's predictable offerings from the Corden Bleu partwork.

Neither Tara nor Robert could have been nicer to him. To compound his malaise, Graham had the knowledge that it all came from within himself.

At the end of the meal, the talk moved to drugs and he brightened at the prospect of showing his cosmopolitan insouciance on the subject. Those rare and over-dramatised puffs of pot taken in Lilian's Abingdon cottage would now stand him in good stead. Even though it was a good ten years since he had smoked, he spoke of cannabis with familiarity and enthusiasm.

As Tara produced the little bag of cocaine, he realised his mistake, but he had already said too much. His refusal to participate, a reflex born of Calvinist upbringing and the fear of doing it wrong, left him feeling gauche and immature.

He watched the others covertly, but it was Tara who held his gaze for the rest of the evening. He stared, with fascinated envy, at the neat, practised way in which she snorted the white powder and, later, the unambiguous intent with which she led Robert off to their bedroom.

As he lay awake in his single bed, Graham's mind lubriciously translated every creak of the old cottage to his own disparagement.

And, once again, as was increasingly the case, the only thought that gave him strength and identity was the knowledge that he was a murderer.

He was woken on the Saturday morning by more creaking. It was probably just the complaint of old beams at the impertinence of central heating, but again he provided an alternative, diminishing interpretation.

The envy he felt was, however, qualified. He did not wish he had Merrily with him, her angular body by his side to be rolled over and enjoyed with comatose morning compliance. It was a pleasure to be on his own. No wife, no squabbling children to force him out of bed on some expensive errand of ferrying.