When Anne discovered he and Rachel were having an affair, he was naively shocked by her reaction. She was poleaxed, wounded deeply, apparently terminally, her confidence and newly acquired vision shattered.
“We lived for each other,” was all she could say. “Now you’ve gone away.”
Emotionally Paul had found it impossible to shoulder the responsibility for her pain, particularly as, once again, he knew there were comparisons with her father. He was barely able to cope with his own feelings of frustration and inadequacy at the unexpected decline of his career. Paul’s relationship with his authors and his nose for talent had evaporated as quickly as his self-confidence and he had become rootless, only sure of his own misjudgements. Josh, sales director at Wyatt and his own personal friend, had advised a sabbatical, little realizing his wife, Rachel, by now Paul’s PA and unbeknown to him his mistress, would join him on the trip to the Ardèche. In fact the journey had been more like an elopement than anything else, a confirmation of their relationship which made Anne withdraw more resolutely to her new world of unmade beds and half bottles of Scotch — and an unwelcome surprise to Josh, although he knew his marriage had been over for a long time.
But the heady discovery of middle-aged love failed to turn Paul and Rachel into a couple of born again adolescents, and they avoided running through waist high Lawrentian grass or bathing naked in dew ponds. Instead they had stayed in a small pension in a remote village and hiked each day through the mountains. Using local maps and guides, they had found routes they could tackle and springs they could drink from. It was early April and the sunshine came in great shafts, warming them without becoming oppressive.
One late morning they had arrived in a sunlit valley, yellow with gorse and with a stream coursing its way down from the mountains. Paul and Rachel had walked over stepping-stones and then sat on the opposite bank, eating new bread and an over-ripe Brie with cherry tomatoes that were sweet and juicy. “Clapped out publisher invades TV commercial for French aperitif,” Paul had announced, and they had laughed in that companionable, complacent, contented way which allowed for easy silences and a determined effort not to “have fun”. The world they had left behind, with its frantic round of socializing, denunciations and mistrust seemed all too close, lying in wait for them both with its eroding guilt and pretence. In some ways he was mirroring the earlier world that he and Anne had shared at Spindrift.
In the Ardèche Paul and Rachel could focus on each other sufficiently to keep out the real pain; had they not been able to do this, their new absorption and mutual reliance would have quickly broken down. As a tangible symbol of their new life they decided to buy a house in the village of Viviers near an ancient bridge on the river. It was a modest stone structure with two rooms downstairs, two upstairs, and primitive toilet facilities, but the garden was a delight, walled, with an almond tree and small formal beds surrounding a fountain.
Only occasionally did Paul remember the barge, feel the weight of Anne’s pain, remember how it had happened to her before, differently but just as catastrophically. Nevertheless, he knew he couldn’t reverse his decision. His need for Rachel was paramount, whatever his still strong feelings for Anne.
A few weeks after their return from the Ardèche, his mother unexpectedly died, and her considerable fortune from the sale of the chain of grocers shops in the Midlands to a large corporation was enough to ensure Cafferty Steele’s future, and eventually buy the French house as well.
Charmian Lucas, however, had been particularly fond of Anne and Paul knew that his mother’s will was a strong protest about Rachel. She had already castigated him long and hard, but he was Charmian’s only son and their relationship was too close for a complete stand-off. On his death, Anne would inherit everything. There had been no way of convincing his mother otherwise.
As he drove on through the rain, Paul remembered the conversation he and Rachel had had at the ruins of a château overlooking the gorges of the Dunière. Steep wooded hills plunged down into the narrow river valley, the trees giving way to rock and scrub and eventually to a torrent of dark, shadowed water and rapids that hazed the landscape in a silver sheen of mist.
They had sat on the springy turf of a rolling hillside, and Paul had gazed down at a hawk spiralling into the woods. He had picked up a tuft of grass, rubbing the sweet, fresh smell into his hands. “Quite a contrast, your son, isn’t he?” he remembered saying, thinking ruefully of his own boy. “Peter’s so withdrawn.”
“Do you actually like Ben?” she had asked.
“Yes, but sometimes he scares me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s full of energy and so sure of himself. He’s got all that easy charm and talent. The rugby, the cello, the authority, the leadership.” He had laughed with sudden bitterness. “I’m sure Ben wouldn’t have burnt out like me.”
“Through no fault of your own,” she had said too glibly. “Anyway — you’re having your renaissance now.”
“I feel for him,” Paul had continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “He’s getting such an easy ride.”
“What should Ben do? Break a leg? He’s an innocent. He doesn’t know about the slippery slope. Yet.”
As the Peugeot continued to thread its way through the traffic, the rain intensified and a contraflow system began as he neared Wimbledon. “PHONE THE CONES HOT LINE.” The message came up out of the mist. Paul had often thought of telephoning the number and receiving mystic information — like the truth. Like how deeply did Rachel love him? Was her love as strong as Anne’s? Phone the Cones Hot Line.
More traffic filtered in and slowed him almost to a standstill. Then the queue began to move again until Paul was driving up Wimbledon Hill to the flat he and Rachel had rented while they looked for something a little more substantial with its own small garden.
Anne was talking on the phone to Gerald Batt, her editor on The Guardian, a man she found portentous and guarded, but more essentially her employer and an admirer of her style. “It’s very discerning,” he had once told her, but she had never had enough self-confidence either to believe or contradict him — or even perhaps to develop. Now, however, she needed his praise to escape her twilit world of bed and booze.
“This Coyd. He’s hardly stereotypical.”
“Did you want someone who was?” she asked him, in the special hard voice she used when discussing her work with a professional.
“No. Certainly not. It’s just his injuries — the way he looks — must have given him a harder time than most. The point is — how objective is he?”
“He’s very subjective about everything else but prison. Coyd’s got a photographic memory for detail.”
“You’re sure of him?”
“Yes.”
“What was he inside for?”
“Stealing credit cards.”
“No armed robbery?”
“He’s not the type.”
“If as you say he’s a fantasy merchant about his personal life, are you really sure he’s authentic about prison?” Batt spoke cautiously, as if he needed to ask the question again but didn’t want to undermine her confidence.
“There’s a specific distinction between the way Coyd talks about his past and about the periods he spent in the Scrubs.” Anne paused. “You don’t need to worry about me, Gerry. I can suss it all out now. I mean — I’m not ill any longer.”
“I’m sorry.” He sounded confused and embarrassed. “You’ve been through this personal stuff. I wasn’t implying that it had affected your judgement.”
Weren’t you, she wondered. What would you say if you knew what I’d asked this Coyd to do? That would make a pretty damn good story. “Do you know anyone who would kill my husband?” She could see the headline now, imagine the publisher’s contract, understand the wisdom of acquiring a literary agent.
“Sounds fine, anyway, and the day-to-day cell life angle is good. Stick to that. Why don’t you consider it a kind of ‘day in the life of’ piece?
”
“Yes,” she said. “I might. It’ll be on your desk in a couple of days.”
“It’s good to hear you sounding so much better. So much more positive.”
But I’m not, Anne thought when she put the phone down. I’m not positive at all. I’m making a complete fool of myself.
She heard her mother, armed with recriminations from the past that she still enjoyed using in the present: “The trouble with you, my girl, is that you can’t take a decision.” But I have, Mother, Anne said to herself. I sure as hell have. “Come on, Anne,” came her father’s voice. “We can do it. We can do it together.”
As Paul drove the Peugeot up Gladstone Avenue he saw the leaves of the silver birches dripping moisture even though the rain and mist were beginning to disperse. The mantle was gradually lifting, giving occasional glimpses of a dark, glittering sky that looked cold, rather menacing in its vast canopy — a threatening contrast to the misty, rain-lashed comfort that he had become used to on the drive back from Clapham.
The flat was at the very end of the cul-de-sac and Paul slowly negotiated the stationary cars, nose to tail, some of them carelessly parked too far out into the road. He thought of next year’s publishing list, the hopefully neat balance of commercial books and literature with a smattering of poetry. There was T. B. Skinner’s Royal Marriage, Jenny Becker’s Hollywood Hiatus, Robin Arkwright’s new novel Dancing Bear, the American import, C. J. Clipper’s Arizona Dreaming, C. V. Arlett’s latest Inspector Abercrombie and the two slim volumes of verse published in the Visions format — James Furlow’s Is There Any Light Out There? and Celia Bream’s Tops. There was always the foodie book by that arrogant bastard of a chef André and a new gardening — Paul looked up as a dog ran out of a driveway. The laburnum hedge alongside him gleamed and the last shards of mist lifted into the hard, bright clarity of the night sky above them. A radio played in a car further up the road, relaying traffic news that was abruptly cut out. A door slammed and Paul could hear a television set in the Edwardian house next door that belonged to Mrs Charrington.
He must ask Anne to divorce him. Soon.
She was in the kitchen, making Peter’s supper while her son watched the television in the next room. As Anne toasted bread, she also had her second Scotch of the evening, knowing there would be many more to come.
Her breakdown had really begun over a year ago when she had driven down to Spindrift and realised Paul had taken Rachel there. If he had wanted a place to have sex with her, why hadn’t he gone to a hotel? Why here, where they had been at their happiest?
Anne had known immediately she opened the cabin door, for the evidence had been well displayed, unsubtly careless, outrageously insensitive. The wine glasses lay in ancient washing-up water, and the double bunked bed had been made overhastily. Her rage was as great as their carelessness, later turning into the cold hatred she had once felt for her father.
Anne had locked up Spindrift that November evening, and with stinging tears of fury in her eyes trudged up the frosted path over the marshes until she came to a small headland. There, in the sparkling, freezing stillness of that bitter winter night, she looked down on the barge and saw in her mind’s eye Paul and Rachel hurrying towards the gangplank. I want him dead, she said to herself over and over again. I want him dead.
For a while, she stayed watching the dark hulk of the barge where she and Paul and later Peter had spent so many happy years, but her tears of rage came again when she imagined them screwing. She saw Rachel’s legs locked tight round Paul, and she saw him penetrating her with an animal grunt.
Anne climbed slowly down the steep slope, her footsteps crunching on the frozen grass, but when she reached the car she paused, looking back at the tide gradually rising in the creek, making the boats and barges heave and groan and slap against each other with little nudging sounds. The pain of being pushed aside again was too great to bear.
When her father died, Anne had belatedly tried to reach her mother, but she tried too hard and Isabel Bruton sensed a pity and understanding that humiliated her and she kept her younger child at a distance, favouring the older girls who rarely discussed the betrayal.
Anne had learnt to accept isolation, and when she fell in love with Paul and he reciprocated so powerfully she could barely believe that life could be so good. For years she recklessly lived in happy security, but when that had finally crashed around her her isolation returned — and this time much more savagely. She went down and stayed down.
The visit to the barge had been a turning-point, and although Anne appeared to be climbing slowly out of her acute depression this was far from the case. The people around her had been hopeful. Peter imagined that his mother would eventually return to her “old self and so did Gerald Batt. Instead, slowly, relentlessly, a familiar fury was building up inside her. She wanted him dead.
Eamonn and Freda were silent as they ate their television dinners. Watching the flickering screen, she was as absorbed as ever, while he was still trying to work out whether Anne Lucas’s request was providential. When she had first approached him, Eamonn had almost enjoyed recounting his prison experiences. He had also briefly given her a picture of his beloved mother, alive and well, living in County Kerry, but he knew Anne Lucas was only going along with his picture-book nostalgia because she was anxious for an accurate account of how he had lived three to a cell and not allowed slopping-out to break him.
They had discussed anger, and Eamonn had told Anne Lucas about a prisoner who had once appeared to befriend him and not to mind being shut up with a man whose face was so unsettling. At first it had seemed a miracle, but it wasn’t long before Eamonn’s new cell-mate began slowly deriding him to other inmates, calling him names behind his back, emphasizing his disfigurement and later openly mocking his obsessive love for his deranged mother.
“I wanted to kill him,” Eamonn had told Anne. “I wanted to find a way. He betrayed me.”
They had talked about betrayal for some time, and he eventually admitted he had used all his meagre savings to pay to have his cell-mate beaten up. It was after Eamonn had completed a graphic description of the aftermath of this incident that Anne Lucas suddenly asked, “Do you know anyone who would kill my husband?” She was smiling, ready to make a joke of it all.
Coyd had already smelt the drink on her breath and at first responded in kind. “Have you ever tried yourself?”
“I thought you might know someone,” she had replied. It was only then that he wondered if she might be serious.
“I’ll have to look in my little black book.” He was still joking, wagging a finger at her in mock reproof, his thoughts confused.
“I’m serious,” she had said uncertainly.
“Is this meant to be some test of authenticity?” he had asked her, keeping the gentle sarcasm in his tone in an attempt to push her still further.
“Will you answer my question?” she had asked quietly.
Could she be serious, he had wondered. This worn-out, drunken woman with the probing questions.
“I’d pay.”
She was tall and dark with a pale oval face. Slightly clumsy, almost gawky, she regularly dropped her notebook or searched for it feverishly in her over-capacious bag. Once she had knocked over a cup of tea.
Anne Lucas was trembling now, and Eamonn had gazed at her speculatively. He liked her. When they had first met she had given his ruined face a look of anguish, but after that she had always made eye-contact.
“Are you going to help me or not?” she had asked him impatiently.
“Can you afford it?”
“All his money comes to me.” She had spoken softly. “Do you know someone?”
“I might.” Eamonn still couldn’t believe that either of them could possibly be serious.
“How much would I have to pay?”
“Ten grand on commission. Twenty on completion.” Eamonn had improvised the amount, but it would do for a start, just in case she wasn’t joking.
“Ho
w soon?”
“This isn’t mail order.”
“What are we talking about? A week? Months?”
“I’ll have to make enquiries.”
She had stared back at him for a minute, calmer now, and then got to her feet. “Will you get in touch?”
“Yes.”
He had watched her depart with gathering disquiet.
Chapter 5
Anne got up late, knowing she should phone Coyd immediately, but putting it off because she was already running out of time to get to Peter’s open day.
As she drove towards the school, she had the light-headed feeling of a child playing a game that had run out of control. She had had a couple of doubles before setting out to see Coyd, but had never intended to ask him such an amazing question. Instead, it seemed to have slipped out as the cold rage inside her rose like a steel grey tide. She had hardly slept for the last few nights, and her grinding exhaustion must have played its part in undermining her reason.
She would have to stop at a phone box and tell the wretched little man that she had been drunk or joking or both. Anne was sure she could explain away her bizarre request, and in any case she hadn’t the slightest faith in Eamonn Coyd. He was a small-time recidivist who no doubt preferred institutions to the outside world, particularly with the way he looked, but as to his ability to find an assassin, she might as well have asked the Avon lady.
With only a passing twinge Anne wondered if Coyd could blackmail her. Yet even if this outside chance occurred she could always refuse to admit that she had said anything at all, and he would certainly not be a credible witness against her. What really worried Anne was her state of mind. Was she going mad? How could she have asked a small-time crook to arrange Paul’s death? On the other hand what would she feel if he died by accident? The cold rage told her that she would be glad, that it would please her, but incredulity soon surfaced again.
A few years ago her life had seemed preordained to revolve around an endless succession of commissions, interviews, meetings and gatherings, and caring for their mock-Regency house in a leafy road by the common. Looking back Anne saw herself as a campaigning journalist, a liberal lady, an espouser of causes, a fully paid-up member of the chattering classes, and it left a wave of self-loathing. She and Paul had held and attended numerous dinner parties at whose tables there was much talk of schools becoming accountable to parents, parents becoming accountable to children but never spouses becoming accountable to each other. A little bit of mystery, of devious flexibility, frequently oiled the wheels of apparent matrimonial bliss, and so it had been with theirs, which was truly the greatest surprise.
I Want Him Dead Page 5
