‘I waited in the car for ages but I was so drunk I couldn’t stay awake. I was woken up by the sound of some girl screaming and Paul shouting – it sounded close, like they was outside in the garden. I got out the car to see what the hell was going on and went through the hedge the way I’d seen Paul go. I could see right into the kitchen – I only stood there for a few seconds but that was long enough for me. I saw Paul chasing her over there – ’ he nodded his head in my direction – ‘round and round this table.’ He prodded the table three times with his stubby index finger as if to prove the veracity of what he was saying.
(
Stabbing and slashing at the burglar’s back. ‘We’re playing musical chairs now! We’re playing musical chairs now!’ The flailing knife snagging his neck and loosing a geyser of bright arterial blood.
)
‘She was screaming her head off and I could see she was covered in blood,’ the fat man went on. ‘I figured she’d disturbed Paul while he was robbing the house and he’d gone psycho and started cutting her up with his hunting knife. I thought the kid’s parents would come running downstairs to help her any second and Paul’d kill them too. I remember thinking to myself:
He’s got the bloodlust on him. He’s gonna kill everyone in that house. He’s gonna cut them all up. There’s gonna be a right royal massacre.
’
The fat man raked up a little more phlegm with a few short, violent pig grunts and slid his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.
‘Well, basically, I panicked. I mean, a bit of robbing’s one thing, but I didn’t want to get caught up in no murder. I decided to get out of there sharpish-like.
‘But when I got back to the car I remembered that Paul had taken my car keys with him. I’ve never learned how to hotwire a car; nicking cars ain’t my thing. But the screams coming from the house were bloody shocking, so I just legged it back the way we’d come. It was as black as a witch’s hat out here that night, I can tell you, and I got myself well and truly lost in all them lanes, but I just kept going. All I knew was I had to get as far away from this house as I could.
‘Anyways, I found my way out onto the main road finally and ended up walking all the way back to town. It must’ve taken me close on three hours. As soon as I got in I called the mobile number I had for Paul. It rang and rang but there weren’t no answer.’
(
Soft, muffled, a series of musical notes like a bird or maybe even an insect. It stopped and then a few seconds later it started again.
)
‘I was expecting Paul to turn up at my flat at any minute all covered in blood, saying he’d done something terrible, and asking me to hide him or help him to get out of the country. But he didn’t show up. I called his mobile again, but now it was switched off. I left loads of messages, but he didn’t call me back. I kept the local radio on all day expecting to hear that there’d been a bloodbath in a house out in the country, but there was nothing about no killings. All I could think was that they just hadn’t found the bodies yet. As it got later, I started to think he must have done a runner in my car. Too scared to come back here in case the police were waiting for him. I figured he was probably miles away by now, lying low up north.’
It was a strange sensation to hear my own murder being described; it made my arms come up in goose bumps. And I couldn’t help thinking that it could so easily have turned out that way. If we’d said the wrong thing while Paul Hannigan was holding us at knife point or if we’d tried to make a run for it, everything the fat man thought had happened so easily could have – and on the Tuesday morning Roger would have found Mum and me butchered like cattle on a slaughterhouse kill floor.
‘I was a bloody fool to get involved with a kid like Paul Hannigan. I knew he weren’t right in the head. Now I was worried sick that if the police caught him I’d get dragged into it and end up facing murder charges. As well as all that, my car had all my work tools in it – I’m a plumber, see – so I couldn’t work neither till I got it back. And I couldn’t exactly call the police and report it stolen, could I?’
He laughed and looked up at Mum as if expecting her to laugh along with him, but she remained stonyfaced.
‘Anyways, the next day there was still nothing on the radio about no murders and there was nothing the next day neither. I figured that if Paul had killed someone out here, the police would’ve found out about it by now. Why weren’t it all over the papers and the TV?
‘And that’s when I started to think that maybe I’d got the wrong end of the stick and there hadn’t
been
no killing. I called Paul’s mobile again and again but it was always switched off. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided it was best to do nothing – just sit tight and wait and see what happened.
‘And then on the Friday morning I got a call from the police. My first thought was, they’ve caught Paul and he’s gone and grassed me up. Now I’m gonna get done as an accomplice to murder. But it was nothing like that. They said they’d got a complaint from the Farmer’s Harvest restaurant about a car that had been left in their car park. They said they’d run the number plate through their computer and it had me down as the owner and would I move it sharpish-like. And that was that! Nothing about Paul. Nothing about no murders.
‘When I got down to my car I found it unlocked with the keys still in the ignition. Everything had gone from inside it! Everything except for the bag of dope Paul had with him that night. My work tools and my anorak had gone, my road atlas, Paul’s trench coat that had been on the back seat – ’
I saw Mum tense. Her left foot, which had been unconsciously tapping to a manic rhythm while she listened to the blackmailer’s tale, had suddenly stopped moving. I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking exactly the same thing:
Did he know about the gun?
But it was clear from the way he blithely carried on talking that he didn’t.
‘ – everything had gone! I couldn’t figure it out. Why would Paul leave my car there? Why would he leave it unlocked and with the keys still in the ignition? He’d left a hundred quid’s worth of dope in the glove box! He’d taken my work tools, even though they weren’t worth nothing to him! Why hadn’t he called to tell me what had happened? What was he playing at?
‘I asked around, but no one had seen him or heard from him. It was as if he’d just disappeared into thin air. The whole thing was doing my head in, I tell you. So the next day, the Saturday, I drove back out here – to
Honeysuckle Cottage
.’ He said the twee name with infinite contempt. ‘Thought I’d take a look around. I reckoned that was the only way I was gonna get to the bottom of all this.
‘I parked up round the side there, close under the trees so’s I couldn’t be seen. I hadn’t been there five minutes when I saw the two of you come out of the house. I recognized the girl from that night, and I could see she was as right as rain. I watched you get in your car and drive away – I was worried for a second that you were gonna turn up where I was and see me, but as luck would have it you went the other way. I followed you all the way into town and when you stopped at the supermarket I parked up behind you and went in too – discreet like – I didn’t want you to catch on. I watched you do your shop, trying to overhear what you were talking about, trying to see if I could pick up a clue to what happened out here.’
The thought of this sinister clown following us through the labyrinth of country lanes, shadowing us up and down the bright aisles as we filled our trolley, watching us select our most intimate personal items – soaps and shampoos, Tampax and toilet rolls – filled me with revulsion. I remembered the dream I’d had the night after we’d killed Paul Hannigan: the car parked in the narrow lane that began to follow the van taking us to prison, the shadowy figure behind the wheel.
Who’s that?
Mum had asked me in the dream.
It’s the watcher
, I’d replied. Was it possible I’d known all along that Paul Hannigan hadn’t been alone, but at a level so deep in my subconscious it could only reveal itself in a dream?
‘Like I say,’ he went on, ‘I couldn’t work it out. I’d seen your girl covered in blood, I was sure Paul had been doing her in. Now here she was, out shopping, all hunky-dory. And Paul had disappeared off the face of the earth. No one had seen him, no one had heard from him. None of it made any sense. And when I tried his mobile, the line was just . . . dead.’
(
The strange grimace on Mum’s face as she’d beaten the mobile into a masticated pulp.
)
‘And that’s when I started to think that maybe you two had done something to him.’
40
The morning clouds had dispersed completely now, and the kitchen was filled with bright golden sunlight. It reflected off the fat man’s glasses so that when he turned towards the window his eyes disappeared behind two white rectangles of glare.
The ebullient spring sunshine was completely out of tune with the tense scene unfolding in the kitchen. I couldn’t help thinking that if this were a novel or a movie, the blackmailer would have arrived in the middle of a ferocious thunderstorm, a day of growling thunder and lurid yellow forks of lightning, torrential rain lashing the gravel drive. But this wasn’t any fiction, this was real life. There he sat in our sun-filled kitchen, slowly unpicking the stitches of the shroud that hid Paul Hannigan’s decomposing corpse, while the day outside called for picnics and barbecues and ice-creams at the seaside.
He looked directly at Mum now, his hands holding his belly like a bright yellow beachball he’d just caught and was preparing to toss back to her. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s when I started to think that you two might have done something to Paul.
‘I tried to think back to that night and what I’d seen in those few seconds when I’d been standing in the garden looking into the kitchen. I could remember it pretty clearly, considering how drunk I’d been: the kitchen lit up like a TV set and Paul chasing the girl round and round the table. I went over it and over it in my mind. I
had
to be missing something, because Paul hadn’t killed no one. It was driving me crazy – and then at last I cracked it!
‘I’d been concentrating on Paul all the time, see, I’d been looking at what
he’d
been doing. But when I focused on the girl instead – well, the whole picture changed like magic. Paul weren’t chasing
her
around the table any more –
she
was chasing
Paul
! And if she was chasing Paul,’ he added, smiling, ‘then maybe the blood she was covered in weren’t hers.’
Mum’s right hand slipped subtly into the fleece’s pouch pocket. I knew she had her hand on the gun. Was she taking the safety catch off? Was she getting ready to shoot him?
The blackmailer hadn’t noticed her surreptitious movement. He continued with his story, apparently suspecting nothing.
‘If something had happened to Paul in this house, I was sure there’d be some sort of clue left behind. So I decided to come back to have a poke around and see what I could find.’
I saw Mum draw herself up to her full height and straighten her back. She knew there’d been no clues for him to find in the house; she’d taken care of that herself, she’d dotted every
i
, she’d crossed every
t
. But I had a horrible presentiment of what the blackmailer was going to say next, and I felt my knees start to tremble in my pyjamas.
‘I’d seen you go shopping in town that Saturday morning, so I drove down here the very next Saturday, betting that this was a regular weekly outing. Sure enough, at about ten I saw your car go past with the two of you in it chattering away like a couple of canaries. So I drove on up to the house and let myself in.’
‘How did you get in?’ Mum asked, horrified.
‘Paul may have talked a load of rubbish most of the time, but he weren’t wrong about the windows on these old properties – easy to force as anything. I see you’ve had new locks fitted to them now. Very sensible.
‘Anyways, I searched the place from top to bottom and I couldn’t find nothing. The whole place was as clean as a whistle and I’d almost given up, to tell you the truth, when I found
this
.’
He leaned forwards and reached into his back pocket, his face turning an unhealthy claret with the effort, his breathing coming in phlegmy rasps. Finally he tossed a pink plastic card onto the kitchen table. Mum picked it up, not understanding, having to squint closely at the childish signature with its silly arabesque and the postage-stamp-sized photo before – with an involuntary grimace – she understood what it was.
She was unable to resist throwing a hostile, accusatory glance at me.
‘It’s Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence,’ the fat man said. ‘I found it upstairs, hidden away in a little box in your girl’s dressing table. I knew that if this was here . . . then Paul Hannigan had never got out of this house alive.’
Mum watched him struggle to put the driver’s licence back in his pocket. She seemed somehow reduced, deflated. She collapsed in the chair opposite him as if she feared she’d fall down if she didn’t move quickly.
She’d been defeated by the blackmailer, by the obese bullfrog grinning at her across the table. And she’d been defeated, ironically, by the person she’d been trying so hard to protect:
me
. I’d given the enemy the key that had enabled him to get inside our fortress, to get behind her carefully prepared defences and force our surrender. She couldn’t hide her bitter disappointment, her sense of betrayal.
‘It weren’t difficult to work out what must have happened,’ the fat man said, smiling smugly at his own cleverness. ‘You disturbed Paul while he was robbing the house, and there’d been a fight. Somehow your girl here managed to get his knife off of him and in the struggle he’d ended up dead. You thought you could cover the whole thing up. You thought you could outsmart everyone and just carry on with your nice little lives as if nothing had happened. But you hadn’t counted on me cropping up, had you?’