Dirty Tricks (22 page)

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.

PART FOUR

One of the many false starts in my life was when I tried to take up golf. My father considered golf, like the
Daily Telegraph
and Bell’s whisky, to be one of the essential elements of civilized male society. As in the palaeolithic era, learning to swing a club was a rite of passage. To me it was just a game, and a singularly boring one, just the sort of thing a bunch of old buffers like my dad would go in for. The last straw was the way the coach kept on about ‘working on your follow-through’. Once the ball’s gone it’s gone, I thought. How you swing your club through the air afterwards can’t make a damn bit of difference to where it ends up.

So I thought at fifteen. Now, at forty-something, I finally understood what my old golf coach meant, and as a result the following Sunday was very far from a day of rest for me. I didn’t get home until almost 2 o’clock that morning, by which time I was too exhausted to do more than verify that the tape I had taken from Clive’s house was indeed the one containing Karen’s incriminating call, and then erase it. There was a message for me on my own machine, but I felt unable to cope with any more news, either good or bad, and went straight to bed. It took true grit to set the alarm clock for 7 o’clock, but I didn’t want to botch my follow-through.

The first thing I did on awakening was return the various household items I had used to their place, having first carefully cleaned them. I devoted especial care to removing all traces of the red mud from the Wellingtons Garcia had worn at the quarry. Then it was time to take out the rubbish. I packed all the plastic sheeting, the gloves, the sponge-bag and the used packing tape into a large dustbin-liner, put it in the BMW and drove around until I found a house where building work was being done, and dumped the sack in the skip outside. Then I proceeded to the car-wash at Wolvercote roundabout, where the BMW was mechanically sluiced, mopped, hosed, scrubbed, waxed, rubbed and blown dry. Thanks to Clive’s incontinence the boot stank like a public lavatory, so I bought a litre of motor oil from the garage and poured most of the contents over the carpeting. Then I cross-threaded the cap so that it wouldn’t close properly, and tossed the container in.

Back home I phoned Karen’s mum in Liverpool. Old Elsie and I had never got on. She disapproved of her daughter’s hasty remarriage, and still more of her choice of partner. Oddly enough, Elsie was the only one with the courage to come out and speak the truth, which was that Karen should have ‘stuck to someone of her own sort’. This was a remarkable intuition. Dennis Parsons and I were not born that far apart on the social ladder, and by the time he had gone up in the world and I had gone down, the difference was as subtle, if as definitive, as that between Bordeaux and Côtes de Bordeaux. But such distinctions are second nature to women of Elsie Braithwaite’s generation. She spotted immediately that Dennis, for all his glam, was ‘Karen’s sort’, while for all my grot, I was not. Our Elsie was also a member of a fundamentalist sect which believes that making a phone call on the Sabbath constitutes an infringement of the Fourth Commandment, so I got doubly short shrift. No, I certainly couldn’t speak to Karen. Karen wasn’t there, and Elsie didn’t know what on earth had possessed me to think that she was. I made my apologies and hung up.

The action of replacing the phone triggered one of those abdominal depth-charges which are nature’s way of telling you that you’ve cocked up. Phones, the fatal row with Karen, my call to Alison, our luncheon date! While I was cavorting up the motorway in hot pursuit of Garcia, Alison would have been sitting in the restaurant where I’d arranged to meet her, glancing repeatedly at her watch while the waitresses and other customers tittered amongst themselves and whispered ‘She’s been stood up!’ No woman would easily forget or forgive such a slight, least of all Alison Kraemer. Once the facts of the case came to light, my whereabouts on the Saturday in question were bound to be a critical issue. If Alison were to inform the police that I had not only unaccountably failed to show up, but hadn’t even phoned to explain or apologize, my position would become awkward in the extreme.

I took a deep breath and called her number. The phone was answered by young Rebecca.

‘Can I speak to your mother, please?’

‘Who’s speaking?’

I hesitated.