Murder, Mystery, and Magic

by John Burke

Or the precautions had been mysteriously overridden.

  That evening we silently watched a television programme dealing with the extirpation of garden pests.

  The following Tuesday I happened to see Deborah in the street with her little boy wriggling in his pushchair. She was preparing to smile at me, even solicit my congratulations, and I could imagine the twee remarks that would come gushing out. I kept walking straight ahead, and before we drew closer she swung the pushchair perilously across the traffic towards the opposite pavement.

  One day she would surely shove it straight under a bus.

  Could I make her do that, simply by looking at her? Not that I’d wish any such tragedy on her, of course. It was over long ago, I had nothing to do with her any more, or she with me.

  But suddenly the sun was shining, catching the weather vane on the town hall tower, and I laughed, and the day was bright with hatred—honest, invigorating hatred, good for the bloodstream and for striding out…and meditating.

  One evening Amanda insisted that we throw a dinner party to celebrate the anniversary of two of her group graduating, or one getting married or remarried, or something equally trivial.

  “And you won’t give them any of your looks, will you?” It was only half a joke.

  There were three of her friends—Marjorie, Christine and Penelope—and their husbands: the pimply one, the confident third-level quango administrator who sweated more liberally and grew noisier with each glass of wine, and the weaselly little bank manager. One thing the three men had in common: they all looked sheepish as their wives burbled on about the famous occasion when the loo had overflowed, or the utterly ghastly day when that dreadful girl from Shrewsbury had brought not just her dreadful father but his awful floozie blind drunk to prize-giving; and that simply frightful Emma something-or-other who had ruined the school choir’s performance of chunks from Hiawatha because she couldn’t read music but couldn’t be chucked out after her father had just presented the school with a new gym.

  The women’s voices rose half an octave in the squawking ecstasy of reminiscence. I watched their lips twisting, pouting, gushing out banalities, and thought how lovely it would be to petrify each of those faces just as they had reached their most grotesque grimace. Like the old childhood threat about pulling faces just as the wind changed.

  As usual, one of them decided it was her turn to dominate the conversation.

  This time it was Penelope Bibby, whose husband was the quangocrat. On a basis of nudge-nudge secrets which he had confided to her, she liked to do her own bit of nodding and winking, keen to air her knowledge about the workings of insurance companies and investment analysts being given a hard time by a Sunday business supplement investigation.

  “I mean, I ask you, some of the things these companies bury in the small print! I mean, look at our policy. Do you have a smoke alarm, do you have a fire escape, do you smoke in bed, do you make love at too high a temperature?” She sniggered. “I suppose you meet all the right criteria, Amanda? Still got the rope ladder? Always had it,” she confided to the rest of us, “in the dorm. Scared stiff of being burnt alive. Not that they ever pampered us with a proper fire. But Amanda insisted on keeping her rope ladder coiled up under the bed.”

  Amanda had gone very pink and wasn’t laughing. I knew it was true, but it wasn’t one of the memories she liked to toss to and fro. I tried to turn it against the others by asking what each of them was most scared of.

  All the women started babbling at once, as if proud of their lovable little fears and failings. Penelope, anxious to cover up her gaffe, was the loudest of all in her eagerness to tell us of her nightmare of a car windscreen shattering in her face while driving. “Broken glass,” she wailed. “My eyes, I’m so sensitive about my eyes. Can’t even bear to have a doctor examining them.”

  Tom Bibby said: “Modern windscreens don’t shatter like that.” The weariness in his tone made it obvious that he had told her this a dozen times before.

  Christine admitted to a terror of moths and butterflies. Her husband looked embarrassed. I said breezily that he ought to take her to the butterfly farm ten miles away and shake her out of it.

  Christine shuddered and glared at me.

  Penelope challenged me: “And what about you, Tony? What scares the pants off you?”

  “Women,” I said. “Only it’s not so much a matter of scaring them off me….”

  Penelope made a face, but the others laughed thinly, and the moments of tension were over. For the time being.

  When Amanda went out to the kitchen to bring on a fruit pudding she had slaved over after reading the recipe in the back of her gardening magazine, I took some plates out to clear the table. I kissed her. She looked startled. We didn’t usually get demonstrative out of bed, but I felt something reaching between us, coming to fulfilment. I welcomed the sensation; but she was trying to keep it at arm’s length.

  Clasping her hands round the fruit bowl as if to steady herself, she said: “I suppose Penny really is getting a bit of a bore.”

  We went back in. Neither of us looked at Penelope, who was still rattling on.

  Tom Bibby was uneasy. I could tell he wanted his wife to shut up, but he wasn’t going to say so in front of the rest of us.

  That night Amanda and I made love more fiercely than either of us had been used to. When it was over, she panted: “You were thinking of Penny.”

  “Penelope? Good God, I’ve never fancied—”

  “Not fancying her, I mean, you’re thinking of how to…wipe her out. And I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  My arm was around her damp shoulders, my lips close to her left ear. “If you don’t want to, it won’t work. And it already is working, just the way it did with your boss.”

  “That was an accident.”

  “One that you willed.”

  She was trembling in the darkness, only it wasn’t really dark. The bedroom was filled with a wonderful light. “Tony, what’s going to happen?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  The trouble was that we didn’t actually see it. All we got were garbled but colourful reports a week later.

  Tom and Penelope had been at home, having a candle-lit dinner. Very romantic, I’m sure. They didn’t notice one of the candles burning down faster than the other, until the glass candlestick cracked. Slivers of glass exploded into Penelope’s face, one of them long enough and sharp enough to reach her brain.

  And I wasn’t even there to see it.

  At the funeral we all shook hands in a silly, solemn way. The women had taken the opportunity to look very chic in their sadness. Christine was wearing a fine black veil. “Charming,” I said. “Just like a butterfly net.”

  If she could have spat at me through the veil, I think she’d have done so.

  Her husband was at my elbow. “Haven’t you done enough damage?” He snapped out that he had been stupid enough to listen to me, and had taken her to the butterfly farm. “She’s starting treatment with a psychiatrist. Going to cost me a bloody fortune.”

  It was funny. Of course it had to be funny. There’s no pleasure in creating horror for anybody else if you’re horrified yourself. It has to be a superb joke, so private and overwhelming that you don’t want to share it with anybody else.

  Except with a partner who can contribute.

  Late at night, in bed holding hands while Amanda kept sobbing, “No…no, please no, Tony,” as if I were raping her, we found ourselves concentrating on Christine. In spite of all the girlish matiness, between them there must be old scores to settle from way, way back. So together we flooded Christine’s mind with a whirl and swirl of butterflies, and when she screamed and reached out to turn the light on, we willed a squadron of moths towards the bulb.

  Two days later we heard that Christine had gone away for ‘a rest cure’, as Marjorie half fearfully, half gloatingly put it.


  “Tony, that’s enough.” Amanda flinched when I put my hand on her arm. “It’s got to stop. We’re pushing them into things they’re terrified of.”

  “More fools them.”

  One Saturday afternoon we went out for a walk. If we hadn’t been together, our minds not concentrating on anything in particular, but free to interlock if triggered, things might not have worked out as they did.

  On the slope above the supermarket we saw Deborah pushing her little boy uphill in his pushchair with a load of groceries in the basket. She glanced at me and looked away.

  Amanda said: “Isn’t that the girl you used to…I mean, before we….”

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “What right has she got to have a child?”

  It was the first time Amanda had ever mentioned the matter. I couldn’t be sure whether it was her own resentment, or something she had telepathically picked up from me. But we both felt the tug of it, the sudden fierce brightness all round us, and something almost like a halo enfolding the pushchair.

  It broke away from Deborah’s grip and began running downhill, gathering speed. There was nobody close enough to stop it plunging under an artic swinging towards the delivery bay of the supermarket. Somebody somewhere began screaming. And beside me, Amanda was sobbing, “No, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t, didn’t….”

  It made quite a mess, as if tins of tomatoes in the load had burst and spilt their squashed red contents into the gutter.

  I tried to put an arm round Amanda, but she wrenched herself away. “How could you make me do that?”

  “I didn’t make you do anything you didn’t want to.”

  Our evenings were no longer so tranquil. At the appointed hour we tried to turn our minds to backgammon or Scrabble, but one evening when she came up with the word MURDER she tried to make out that I had somehow controlled the order of letters. She must have known that it was her own fingers that had selected them. We didn’t go on with that game or ever start another one.

  We weren’t invited to meals with those of her friends who remained, and we didn’t invite them to our home any more.

  Looking at Amanda across the fíreplace one evening, I had a chill feeling that all the joy of hating outwards had been turned inwards. Things I had detested in her friends were deeply ingrained in her, too. How could I ever have married a girl called Amanda? It was such a stupid name. I must always have hated the name Amanda without facing up to the fact. Now it grew daily more and more hateful. Her mannerisms were not just as bad as those of her nauseating clique, but worse. I had never noticed before that when we tried to sit quietly reading, she had a habit of lifting a page long before she was ready to turn it over, and scratching the inner edge with a fingernail. And when at last I could bear it no longer and was taking a deep breath before complaining, she said, without looking up: “Do you have to keep clicking your tongue against your teeth like that?”

  It dawned on me, almost too late, not only that I hated her and could now feel free to hate her, but that she felt the same about me.

  Who was going to make the first move?

  One Saturday evening I half closed my eyes and willed her to lean forward and fall towards the fire. Like all the others, a straightforward accident, But nothing happened. When she glanced up, I could see in her eyes that she sensed what had been in my mind. Her defences were primed.

  There was a high wind that night. I heard slates fall on the dustbin and the path beside the back door. On the Sunday morning, Amanda tried to persuade me to fetch a ladder and see to the slates. I said I preferred to wait until Monday and get someone in who was properly qualified for that kind of work.

  “You’re scared,” she said.

  “I’ve got no head for heights. You know that.”

  Yes, she knew, all right. But although she concentrated on me, there was no way that on her own she could will me up on to that roof. She was stronger than I, and I was growing to envy that and to hate her all the more—all her pretences of unwillingness, of being led astray by me—but never quite strong enough if I resisted. Her only chance was if she could catch me unawares.

  And the same went for me and my chances.

  I worked a lot of overtime in the lab, doing simple jobs that required no concentration. Every day was bright now with promise. All the lab equipment shone as if newly installed and not yet stained by use. My mind shone implacably. I was truly alive, made doubly alert by fear and my own power to inflict fear.

  I couldn’t destroy Amanda in anything like the way the others had been destroyed. No remote control this time, and certainly not powerful back-up from her. It had to be close and real. I had to be right there on the spot. This time I wanted to see it happen.

  On the afternoon when I finally made up my mind, I stayed a long time in the Cherry Tree on the way home. I pretended to have had more to drink than I’d really had, blundering into the umbrella stand on the way in and chucking a batch of pages torn from a technical magazine on to the coffee table, grunting as if I had a hard evening’s work ahead of me.

  She hardly bothered to listen to me. She had been turning over the pages of a glossy gardening magazine, scratching each page as she did so. Even if I’d had any doubts, that would have settled it. When she went out to talk gibberish to some seedlings in the greenhouse, I waited a few moments and then followed her.

  She was always relaxed in those surroundings. Too relaxed. When she saw me coming, it was too late.

  I swear I didn’t actually make it happen. Not physically. It was just that I looked at the gas cylinder connected to the greenhouse heater, and as I looked, it suddenly vomited flame. I was nowhere near it, honestly. But all at once the whole greenhouse was a vast glass oven. Amanda was engulfed in flame as she screamed and groped towards the door.

  The only thing I actually did was turn the key outside, and then when the smell of burnt flesh was billowing through the cracks in the blistered glass, turned it back again. Then I went indoors and called the ambulance.

  There was no way her rope ladder was going to get her out of that.

  At the funeral, those of her friends still alive stared at me. I didn’t know all of them, but somebody seemed to have passed on tales about me. None of the women went in for the usual slobbering kisses, and their husbands didn’t shake my hand.

  As I walked away from the graveside, I looked up at the top of the church tower. Even craning my neck at this angle made me dizzy. That must have been why I saw Amanda so clearly up there, willing me to come and join her at the parapet. And there were other shapes crowding in behind her, and some behind me and around me. A wisp of Penelope, a long wail from Marjorie. All of them urging me to go into the stair turret and climb to the top. But there was no reason to be scared of shadows, even shadows who knew from what had been said at those dinner parties, or hinted at by Amanda during one of their hen parties, about my fear of heights. What remained of Amanda wasn’t strong enough on her own to drag me up there, and those other wraiths were as pathetic dead as when they had been alive.

  My feet firmly on solid ground, all I’m conscious of is this emptiness now it’s all over. Now Amanda’s dead, I’m looking impersonally at what I’ve done, yet at the same time looking at it in dismay. Because I’ve destroyed the only person who could have shared the joke.

  Like I said, loving and hating are so close. I’d loved Amanda. Really loved her, in my own way. It was her own fault that she’d had to be killed, and the true horror is that now there’s nobody left to love or hate.

  Except myself.

  And I don’t hate myself. Well, not all that much. Not yet.

  And when I do…?

  STAND-IN

  It was not until the middle of the evening that she began to have her suspicions. Walter had been so assiduously attentive that she had instinctively relaxed, soothed by his affectionate voice and his still-youthful smile. It was not until she yawned and suggested they should go to bed early that she sensed something was wrong. He l
ooked ever so slightly disconcerted. Then he said, brightly: “It’s a bit early yet.”

  She studied him for a moment. “Is there anything wrong, dear?”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “It would do us good to make an early night of it. We’ll have a nice drink first.”

  She flicked the switch near her chair, and sat back in the comfortable anticipation of being shortly presented with hot chocolate from the service chute.

  Walter, rather too airily, said: “I don’t really feel tired yet. I think I’ll sit up a little bit longer.” He paused, as though considering his own remark judicially, and then added: “But you run along, darling. As soon as we’ve had our drink, you run along.”

  She looked away, feeling more than ever uneasy. It just couldn’t be—he would surely never have done such a thing…? It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let herself believe it.

  But once the idea was in her mind, she couldn’t just pretend that it wasn’t there. There was only one way of finding out.

  Casually she got up and walked across the room. A quick glance at the door of the wine cupboard showed that Walter’s panel was locked. She opened the drawer to get the emergency key—and discovered that it was not there.

  She drew a deep breath and turned to face the inquiring gaze of her husband.

  She said: “Walter, I know what you are. You’re not yourself.”

  “Really, darling….”

  The reply was feeble and uncertain. It quite decided her. They could never grapple with a really awkward situation.

  Walter was getting up. She glanced quickly round the room, and saw the old-fashioned poker that Walter insisted on having in the ornamental fireplace—for all his technical brilliance and belief in progress, Walter had a great longing for old traditions, and a rather naive affection for old-world charm in his home. She was glad of it now. She grabbed the poker, brushed past Walter, and drove the end of the poker through the woodwork of the wine cupboard.

  “No!” cried Walter.

  She twisted the metal against the lock, and a moment later the door cracked open, showering jagged splinters and fragments on to the floor.