Rules for Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  “I’m not sure that’ll happen.”

  “I think it will. You’ll get some credit for figuring out that the list and the murders were connected. Give them the information they don’t have. He killed Eric Atwell, with a gun he said he took from a crime scene. Tell them we met on a website called Duckburg. You’ll be fine.”

  “I have a lot more questions.”

  “I have to go. Sorry, Gwen.”

  “Can I ask you one more, then?”

  “Of course,” I said. I knew what it would be.

  “What happened to my father? Did Marty kill Steve Clifton?”

  I must have hesitated for a few seconds because she added, “Or was it you? I need to know.”

  “After Claire … after my wife died, I have a very hard time remembering the following year. I had terrible dreams, and I was filled with guilt, and maybe I was drinking too much.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “And during that time, I had this recurring dream, and sometimes I wonder if it actually happened.” It was cold where I was standing, but I could feel sweat beading up at the base of my neck while I talked. “In this dream I hit your father with my car. I got out to see if he was okay, and he wasn’t, of course, but he was still alive. His legs were going one way and the top part of his body was going the other. I told him who I was and why I was there, and then I watched him die.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Gwen said in a voice I couldn’t read.

  “It still feels like a dream,” I said. “It all feels like a dream.”

  “Are you sure you can’t meet with me? I could drive to you. I’d come alone.”

  “No,” I said, after a moment. “Sorry, Gwen, I just can’t. I just don’t think I could take it if I was arrested—”

  “I told you I would come alone.”

  “—and I don’t want to answer any more questions. I don’t want to relive the past any more than I’ve had to do these past few days. It’s been pure luck that I’ve had these few years, even though, down deep, I knew it couldn’t last. Sorry, I can’t see you again. It’s impossible.”

  “You do have a choice in the matter,” Gwen said.

  “I don’t. I really don’t. It might not seem like it to you, but the last five years … I have terrible dreams every night. I managed to keep going because it was all I knew how to do, but there hasn’t been any joy in it. I’m not afraid, anymore, but I am tired.”

  I thought I heard a sigh on the other end of the line.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Gwen said.

  “No.”

  “Okay. But what you’ve told me is the truth?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Everything I’ve said is true.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Claire Mallory

  Eric Atwell

  Norman Chaney

  Steven Clifton

  Robin Callahan

  Ethan Byrd

  Jay Bradshaw

  Bill Manso

  Elaine Johnson

  Nicholas Pruitt

  Marty Kingship

  Those are the names of the dead. The real names. All except for Marty Kingship.

  I don’t know why I changed his name for the purposes of this narrative. Maybe because he has children, and they, like all children, are innocent of their parents’ crimes. And maybe it’s because he’s the only one who deserves blame for what happened. Besides me, of course.

  It’s funny, I just now realized that Marty Kingship has my initials. Freudian slip, I suppose. I also suppose that astute readers out there will be convinced that there is no Marty Kingship, that there is only Malcolm Kershaw, and that I did all the killings myself. It’s not true. I wish it was, in a way. It would make for a clever ending.

  What is true is that I am responsible for everything that happened. Marty carried most of the acts out, but I was the architect. It all started with me.

  That is the truth. I have committed the sin of omission, but when I say something is true, it is. Believe me.

  *

  I AM IN ROCKLAND, Maine.

  After shooting Marty Kingship (he looked almost pleased as he touched the blood coming through his sweater, then shuddered and died), I went first to Brian Murray. He’d woken when I’d fired the shot, of course, lifting his head, and muttering something. I sat by his side and told him that it was a champagne bottle he’d heard. He rolled over and began to snore again.

  Then I checked on Tess. Humphrey was no longer occupying the sofa across from her. He’d heard the shot and disappeared. As Marty had said, “Some guard dog.”

  Tess was still breathing, and she was on her side so if she did vomit, I thought she’d be okay. It meant that I didn’t need to call 911 right away. I would call them soon enough, but I wanted just a little bit of time.

  I returned to my own apartment and packed a bag. Cold weather clothes, some toiletries, my favorite picture of Claire. It was from our honeymoon, two rainy weeks in London, the best weeks of my life. The picture was taken in a pub, Claire sitting across from me, a slight smirk on her face, not sure she really wanted to have her picture taken, but happy nonetheless.

  I thought about going to Old Devils one last time, saying good-bye to Nero, but it would take time that I wasn’t sure I had. I needed to call the police and let them know that there was a dead body in the residence of Brian and Tess Murray. I wanted to do this soon, of course, because of Tess and the drugs in her system. But I also didn’t want Brian to wake up early in the morning to find a corpse in his bedroom.

  The sky was beginning to lighten as I drove into New Hampshire. I pulled off the highway next to a twenty-four-hour convenience store, and using cash, I bought enough canned food and bottled beer to last me a week. After loading up the trunk of my car in the parking lot, I called 911 on my cell phone, identified myself, and said there was a dead man at 59 Deering Street in Boston. Then I called Gwen, and when she called me back, we had the conversation that I’ve already written about. Afterward, I smashed the cell phone with a brick I found in the parking lot, then put the pieces in a trash bin outside of the store. If they decided to trace me, then I guess they’d figure out that I was traveling north. But I wasn’t too worried about it.

  It had actually snowed a lot less north of the city. There was a scrim of white over everything, more frost than snow, and in the dawn hours the sky was a checkerboard of thin clouds. The world was colorless.

  I reached Rockland by midmorning. I considered waiting somewhere until it was dark again but decided to risk it instead. There was only one other house with a view of Elaine Johnson’s old property, and I would just have to hope that whoever lived there was not spending the morning looking out the window. From my previous visit to Elaine’s house, I’d noticed the single-car garage. Its door had been up, and I remembered it as being empty inside. Elaine’s car, a rusty Lincoln, probably too big for the garage, had sat encased in ice in the driveway.

  I found the house immediately, not far from Route 1, and turned into the unplowed drive with enough speed so that I didn’t get stuck. I pulled around the Lincoln and into the garage, killed the engine, then got out and yanked down the garage door by its rusted handle. I had briefly looked across the street before I did this, toward a boxy, shingled house, smoke billowing from its chimney. I was happy that the front of the garage wasn’t angled toward the street. Hopefully no one would notice that its door was now down.

  I popped a single pane of glass from the back door, reached in, and unlocked it. Once I was inside with my food and my duffel bag, I found some cardboard and tape and sealed the door back up.

  The heat was still on, although the thermostat was set to the low sixties. It was cold, but bearable. I unpacked my food and put the beer in the fridge next to what remained of Elaine’s unclaimed provisions. It was clear that she had been living on cottage cheese and tinned fruit. There was a decent couch in the living room, midcentury style with wooden legs and a low back. I decided that I would sleep there. I went up
stairs to look for clean sheets and a blanket and found them in the master bedroom closet. All I could think about was Marty in his clown mask emerging from this very closet to scare Elaine Johnson to death. She wasn’t my favorite person, but she hadn’t deserved that. When I got back to the living room, I knew that I would never go upstairs again.

  *

  IT’S BEEN FOUR DAYS and I’m still here. I work on this manuscript, and I eat canned beef stew and tomato soup. The beer is gone but I found several gallon bottles of Gallo burgundy in the cellar and I am working steadily through those.

  Mostly what I do is read. During the day I sit in a comfortable club chair by a window. At night I read on the couch, using a penlight under a blanket to see. I am reading mysteries again, not just because they are the only books here, but because I don’t have much time left and I want to revisit some of my favorites. I find that I am most drawn to books I first read when I was barely a teenager. Agatha Christie novels. Robert Parkers. Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels. I read When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block in one sitting and cried after finishing the last sentence.

  I do wish there were more poetry books in this house—I found an anthology of American poetry that had been published in 1962. But I also managed to write down some of my favorite poems from memory. “Winter Nightfall,” of course, by Sir John Squire, “Aubade” by Philip Larkin, “Crossing the Water” by Sylvia Plath, and at least half the stanzas from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray.

  *

  THERE IS NO INTERNET here, and I don’t have a phone.

  I am sure they are looking for me, the man who killed Marty Kingship, the man who has the answers to a string of related murders. I don’t know how much Gwen has helped them out. I assume that she has told them everything about our phone call. Maybe she hasn’t told them how we met in Boston after she’d been suspended. I wonder if she might figure out where I am. So far no one has come knocking on this door.

  They’ll still have plenty of questions. Gwen, I’m sure, still has questions. That’s one of the reasons why I’m writing this memoir. I want to set the record straight. I want to tell the whole truth.

  *

  I WROTE THAT I burned Claire’s entire diary after reading it. That’s not entirely true. I saved one page, probably because I wanted some proof that she had loved me, something in her own handwriting.

  The entry was from the spring of 2009, and this is what she wrote:

  I don’t write enough about Mal in these pages and how happy he can make me. I come home late and he is always on the couch waiting. More often than not he is asleep, a book cracked open and across his chest. Last night when I woke him up he was so pleased to see me. He said he’d read a poem that he thought I’d like.

  I did like it, maybe even loved it. It’s a Bill Knott and I’m going to copy it down here so I will never forget. It’s called “Goodbye.”

  If you are still alive when you read this,

  close your eyes. I am

  under their lids, growing black.

  What else have I lied about?

  I don’t know if this was a lie so much as an omission, but when I killed Norman Chaney up in Tickhill, New Hampshire, I made it sound as though after I strangled him, I left him there on the floor. But in reality, after checking his pulse, I must have panicked, because I picked up the crowbar and hit him in the face and head repeatedly. I won’t describe what he looked like when I’d finished, but I sat down on the floor and thought that I would never get up again, that I would never be sane again. It was Nero coming across the floor that eventually saved me. He gave me a reason to get up and out of the house. I think I made it sound as though I’d saved Nero, but he was actually the one who saved me. Trite, I know. But the truth sometimes is.

  *

  WHEN I TOLD GWEN about my dream of killing Steven Clifton, I was telling the truth, as well. The truth as I know it. I really don’t remember a lot of what happened in that year after Claire’s death (after I ran Claire off the road, I guess I should say), but I do remember that dream, that vivid dream of hitting Clifton with my car. And there are moments, lucid moments, when I remember everything, when it all falls into place. But those moments never last.

  Steven Clifton was terrified. I remember his face. It was pale as milk, almost a blur. It was Gwen’s face. I suppose it wasn’t a dream, after all.

  *

  THERE’S ONE OTHER OMISSION I ought to record. When Marty and I were talking in the Murrays’ house, the night he told me everything, I asked him about the comment he left on the Old Devils website, the comment he posted using the name Doctor Sheppard.

  He’d looked confused when I asked him about it. “Doctor Sheppard,” I said. “He was the killer in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.”

  Now that I think about it, I think that it is possible I was the one who left that comment. It rings a distant bell. Like I’ve said, there have been many nights in the past few years when I don’t know what is real and what is a dream. Claire, her face in darkness, turning and looking at me from her car right before I nudged her off the overpass. Norman Chaney, what was left of him, on the floor of his house in Tickhill. The jolt of the car as Steven Clifton went flying through the summery air. Beer sometimes helps, and maybe I drank so much that I left myself a message in the comments section for “Eight Perfect Murders.”

  And if it was me, then it was a premonition of sorts. I am reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd now, again. I found a copy at the bottom of a stack in the corner of Elaine Johnson’s dining room. It’s the Pocket paperback edition, Ackroyd slumped over in his chair on the cover, a knife protruding from high up on his back. It’s a dull book, really, until you get to the last two chapters. I’ve already mentioned the penultimate one, the chapter titled “The Whole Truth.”

  Well, the last chapter is called “Apologia” and it is the chapter that makes you realize that all along you’ve been reading a suicide note.

  *

  IT IS SNOWING OUTSIDE, and the wind is battering at the windows of the house. I’ve taken a huge risk and lit a fire in the fireplace. Still, I don’t think anyone will notice a little bit of chimney smoke during a storm like this one.

  It’s so nice by the fire with a glass of wine. For my last book, I am reading And Then There Were None. If it isn’t my favorite novel of all time, it’s pretty damn close. Appropriate, too, for the circumstances.

  I’d like to say something here about how I’ll be with Claire again, soon, but I don’t believe any of that nonsense. When we die, we become nothing, the same nothing we were before we were born, but, of course, this time that nothingness is forever. But if it’s where Claire is, in the black, in the nothing, then that is where I should be as well.

  My plan is that when the storm comes to an end, and the plows have done their job, I will fill the pockets of my winter coat with the heavy glass paperweights from the shelf in the living room. At nightfall I will walk from the house into Rockland’s center, and from there out to the jetty, the one that extends a mile out to the sea, creating a breakwater for Rockland Harbor. I will walk to the end, and just keep going. I’m not looking forward to the cold water, but I don’t suppose I’ll feel the cold for very long.

  There will be some satisfaction that I’ll die by drowning, that in a sense I’ll be fulfilling one of the murders from my list. Mac-Donald’s The Drowner.

  Maybe they’ll wonder if it wasn’t a suicide, after all. Or maybe my body will never be found.

  It’s nice to think I’ll leave a mystery in my wake.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Annie’s Book Swap, Danielle Bartlett, James M. Cain, Angus Cargill, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Caspian Dennis, Bianca Flores, Joel Gotler, Kaitlin Harri, Sara Henry, David Highfill, Patricia Highsmith, Tessa James, Bill Knott, Ira Levin, John D. MacDonald, A. A. Milne, Kristen Pini, Sophie Portas, Nat Sobel, Virginia Stanley, Donna Tartt, Sandy Violette, Judith Weber, Adia Wright, and Charlene Sawyer.

/>   ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Swanson’s novels include The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, nominated for an LA Times book award, The Kind Worth Killing, a Richard and Judy pick and the iBooks Store’s thriller of the year in 2015, and, most recently, Before She Knew Him. He lives with his wife and cat in Somerville, Massachusetts.

  ALSO BY PETER SWANSON

  BEFORE SHE KNEW HIM

  ALL THE BEAUTIFUL LIES

  HER EVERY FEAR

  THE KIND WORTH KILLING

  THE GIRL WITH A CLOCK FOR A HEART

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in the UK in 2020

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House,

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  First published in the USA in 2019

  by HarperCollins Publishers

  195 Broadway, New York NY 10007

  This ebook edition first published in 2020

  All rights reserved

  © Peter Swanson, 2019

  The right of Peter Swanson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Cover design by Faber

  Photograph on title page by Koldunuv/Shutterstock, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly