by David Bowker
“Yes,” commented Caro bitterly. “And I’ve fucking well smelled her.”
* * *
WE WAITED all day until the darkness blew in from the sea. With the coming of night, the waves seemed to grow louder, their distant cry a steady incoherent roar that pursued us from room to room. We had searched everywhere for the gun but failed to find it, so were forced to conclude that the weapon was in the possession of our mysterious taunter. All we could do now was wait for him to show himself.
We sat in the kitchen, lit a fire, and waited. Through the open kitchen door, we had a clear view of the hall and the front door. The downside of this was that the aroma of Mrs. Mather drifted in from beneath the closed door of the back room. She now smelled strong enough to make eating impossible.
We sat by the fire, sipping vodka and ice, eyes on the clock above the door. Not having a gun was a worry, but reason told us that whoever had walked into the bedroom to steal the weapon wanted us alive.
Just before eight, several cars rolled into the parking lot. It was the monthy parish council meeting at the village hall. The cars left just after ten, and then there was only stillness and the reassuring crackle of the fire. Eleven o’clock passed, then midnight. Caro made some strong coffee to help keep us awake. We were both sweating with fear. We didn’t know who was coming but sensed they would come soon.
I went upstairs to the bathroom, splashing cold water over my face to ward off the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm me. As I turned off the landing light and was about to go down, something made me glance up at the staircase that led to the top floor. The stairs were bordered by an old wooden bannister, and through its rails I could see something glowing. It was a human face. A thin white face was peering down at me. Its owner gripped the rails with two white-knuckled hands.
I was so startled that I ran downstairs, virtually hurling myself into the hall. In the kitchen, I took a carving knife from a drawer and waited. Before Caro could ask me what was wrong, the intruder moved down the hall and stood in the kitchen doorway, pointing my own gun at me.
It was not Bad Jesus or the ghost of Mrs. Mather but someone else, someone I recognized. A traveler who had returned to port after a long, desperate voyage of love and self-hatred.
“Danny?” I said.
“Very good,” he said. “It’s nice to be remembered.”
Danny Curran, our old art teacher. The years had been extremely unkind to him, although I daresay he deserved it. The warm, joky poseur who used to spend our art lessons lecturing us about how all truly great music ended in 1967 now looked like a remnant of that era himself. He was as leathery and gaunt as an old junkie. His complexion was dotted with tiny pockmarks as if, having run out of places to inject, he had finally resorted to jabbing the hypodermic into his own face.
“Danny?” said Caro, taking a step toward him. When she saw what her old love had turned into, her eyes softened with dismay. Danny saw the look and nodded.
“Yes,” he said, looking at her tenderly. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Am I really that dashing art teacher you once professed to love? I was a bit like Lord Byron in those days. At least I thought I was. He was a cripple, too—as I’m sure you know. Now I’m a fucked-up old man. I lost my wife, my kids, everything I had because of you.” He laughed uncontrollably. It was the laughter of despair, impossible to fake. “All because of you, Caro. I still love you, you know. Did you know Caro is Italian for ‘dear’? And God almighty, you have cost me dear.” He laughed again.
I looked down at the gun, its barrel leveled precisely at the narrow space between Caro and myself.
“If you love me,” said Caro slowly, “then why bring back the body? Why do something that you know is going to hurt me?”
“I wanted you to understand,” said Danny. “I’ve seen what you’ve done. I’ve been your neighbor, my love. I’ve been living next door in the house you thought was empty.”
“You’re going to blackmail us?” said Caro, accidentally breathing in too deeply and almost choking on the smell of death.
“Yes, she does whiff a bit,” said Danny. “Let’s shut the door. We can chat by the fire. It’ll be nice and cozy.”
A loaded gun can be very persuasive. I couldn’t believe that my art teacher, the man who used to lend me his Leonard Cohen albums and tell me that war was wrong, would actually shoot either of us. But for the time being, we were at his mercy, and there was no point in antagonizing him.
We all sat down at the kitchen table.
“You’ve got terrible taste in men,” commented Danny, sinking into a chair. “Thugs or idiots.”
“No prize for guessing which heading you come under,” I said.
Danny nodded in agreement. “I saw you two get married. I even saw your reception.”
Then I remembered. The old man on the bench, alone and weeping. The bailiff who’d called at Caro’s flat. The jogger on the beach. I realized that Danny had been pursuing Caro for five lonely years. As if he knew what I was thinking, he looked at me and said, “She took out a court order against me. Did she mention that?”
I shook my head.
“Yes,” he explained. “I’m not supposed to come within a two-mile radius of her. Or was it one mile? I never could remember. It made no difference, darling.” He smiled at her with genuine affection. “Look at her. Isn’t she just about the most dazzling thing you’ve ever seen? How does she do that? This girl’s been up most of the night waiting for a crazed gunman, and look at her. Big eyes full of light, skin perfect. Can you blame me? Can you honestly fucking blame me?”
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t I make us all a nice cup of tea?”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That’d be nice and civilized, wouldn’t it? Very English. But don’t try anything. I’d love an excuse to put a hole through your ugly fucking face.”
“You don’t mean that,” said Caro.
“Yes, I do.” Danny rattled the table and gritted his teeth like a child in a temper. “I hate his fucking guts. I hate anyone who’s ever touched you. Why do you think I burned his shop down?”
I felt myself blushing with anger. At that moment I wanted to kill him. “I suppose the e-mails were from you, too?” I said.
But Danny wasn’t listening. All his attention was focused on Caro. That cropped blonde head. That mouth to kill for. The rapture on his thin, tired face was explicit and profound. It was as if a humble Italian peasant had come face-to-face with the Virgin Mary.
“You were mine,” he told her. From his jacket, he extracted a crumpled scrap of paper, which he slowly unfolded. “Remember this? You bought me a thesaurus for my forty-fifth birthday. This was the letter you put inside it. Happy birthday, Danny. I will love you forever, your very own Caro. P.S. You are beloved, admired, adored, cherished, darling, dear, dearest, precious, prized, revered, sweet, treasured, worshipped.”
I turned away to switch on the kettle and heard Caro say, “Yes, and when I wrote those words they were true.”
“But you loved me.” He sounded genuinely puzzled. “Love doesn’t just evaporate, does it? It isn’t like an electric light that you can turn off when it suits you. Is it?”
When I turned round, they were holding hands across the table and Danny was quietly weeping. What made the scene even more surreal was that Danny was still pointing a gun at her. The sick bastard may have burned my shop down and inconvenienced me greatly by digging up Mrs. Mather, but at that moment I found him deplorable, distressing, grievous, heart-rending, lamentable, miserable, pathetic, piteous, pitiable, sad, woeful, wretched.
“There are thousands of women in this country alone who could make you happier than I could ever make you,” said Caro.
“Oh, you are so right,” mocked Danny. “I’m such a catch. Women round the world are just queuing up to have relationships with bitter old paupers with spastic legs.”
Caro and I both laughed, recognizing a spark of the warm, self-deprecating humor that had once end
eared Danny to his pupils, before he was ravaged by defeat and loneliness.
“Why don’t you put the gun down, Danny?” I suggested.
The advice was well intentioned, but Danny took exception to it. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, you stinking bollockless ineffectual homosexual bastard of a gym monkey.”
“Hey,” I said, “you talk just like your e-mails.”
This rather ineffectual remark seemed to tip Danny over the edge. As I moved toward the now boiling kettle Danny turned and fired the gun.
The bullet shattered the door of a kitchen cabinet on the wall above my head. Shards of frosted glass rained down around me. The shock waves of the explosion rattled the dirty pans and the cutlery waiting by the sink. I wasn’t sure whether Danny was trying to unnerve me or actually hit me. In all the excitement, I forgot to ask.
When Danny squeezed the trigger, Caro almost fell off her chair. “Danny,” she said, “don’t scare me like that.”
“Like what?” he retorted. “Like the way you scared me when you went off with Andy Wallace?”
“What?” I said. The shot was still clamoring in my ears. I thought I must have misheard.
Caro looked at me and kind of shrugged with her eyes.
“Oh, didn’t you know?” leered Danny, showing how badly he needed a dentist. “When our relationship ran into difficulties, she sought solace in the arms of your fat friend Wallace. Over the years, she’s been a very busy lady.”
That was presumably why Wallace hadn’t attended our wedding. He couldn’t face the pain of seeing his old flame joined to me. He was yet another of the men she had loved and then dumped. How many more of us were there?
“What do you want?” Caro asked Danny.
“Ah,” said Danny. “I see you haven’t lost your knack of getting straight to the point. I want you, Caro. I want you all to myself. But I’m not likely to get that, am I? So, being a realist, I’m willing to share you.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Shut up,” ordered Danny again, pointing the gun at me. I complied. He returned his attention to Caro. “I know you can’t take away my pain. But you can ease it.”
“Why should I?” she said.
“Because if I tell the police about that body out there, you’ll both go down for a long, long time.”
I poured the tea, which we sipped in silence.
“Danny, could you explain something to me?” said Caro.
“I’ll try to,” he answered.
“Why did you go to all the trouble of digging the body up again? If you knew what we’d done, why didn’t you just tell us?”
Danny blinked in surprise. “Because I didn’t think of it.” He emitted a shrill laugh. “God, I really must be mad, mustn’t I? I must be. It’s not a problem, though. Mark can help me rebury her. No one need ever know. Not if you can bring yourself to be good to me.”
I watched Caro contemplating the unsavory implications of his words. What exactly did Danny mean by “good”? That Caro could iron his clothes, make him cups of tea, darn his socks, and bake him flapjacks? Somehow, I didn’t think so. Judging by the look on her face, nor did she.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, shall I?” announced Danny. “First of all, I’m going to take a much-needed bath. Then Caro can start showing how sorry she is for ruining my life. As for you, you gutless parasite,” he said, pointing the gun at my face, “you should be dead. That bomb under your car was meant for you.”
“You tried to blow me up?” I said.
“Don’t act so surprised. Have you any idea what you’ve put me through? Seeing you walking through Kew Gardens, hand in hand. Do you know how thin the walls are in these houses? While I’ve been living next door, I’ve been able to hear you two rutting. I’ve heard her groaning.” He looked directly at me. “She used to come louder when she was with me. Much louder.”
I nodded. Danny got up and limped across the room. “And don’t either of you get any ideas,” he said. He hummed a tune to himself as he went upstairs to the bathroom. It was Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”
* * *
WHEN WE were alone, Caro stared intently into my eyes. “You know what you’ve got to do, don’t you?”
“Phone the army,” I said wearily.
“What good would the army do? What good do they ever do?”
“They could help us fight the police,” I said.
“You’ve got to kill Danny,” said Caro. “He could ruin everything.”
“Everything’s already fucking ruined.”
“Are you going to do it or not?” said Caro.
“Why does it have to be me who kills him?” I said.
“Because I killed the last one.”
“Yes, but you didn’t need to kill her. So it doesn’t count.”
“Doesn’t count? What are you? Eight years old?”
The gas boiler was roaring. Danny was definitely running himself a bath. I took one of Caro’s cigarettes and lit it. I didn’t smoke it; I just needed to do something with my hands. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
She nodded darkly and waited.
“What?” I said.
She passed me a sharp knife from the kitchen drawer. I accepted it unwillingly. “Does it have to be a knife?”
“Well, I don’t see any trains for you to push him under. What’s the matter, Mark? First you can’t bring yourself to kill a mouse, now this. Are you a killer or not?”
Tell her the truth.
No, don’t. It’ll ruin everything.
Everything is already ruined. Look around you. There’s a rotting corpse in the next room and a naked blackmailer upstairs.
“I…”
“What?” said Caro.
“I’ll do it now,” I said.
CHAPTER 12
FATHER FIGURE
I WALKED through into the stinking hall, the soles of my shoes sticking on the fluid that had oozed out of Mrs. Mather’s body. The landing light lit my way as I slowly climbed the stairs. When I was halfway up, I stopped and listened. I could hear water running in the bathroom. I looked down at the knife in my hand. The blade was about six inches long, and both its edges were sharp. I wasn’t sure what it had been designed to cut. All I knew was that it would make quite a mess of my old art teacher. I held the knife upended in my hand, the flat of the blade hidden behind my wrist.
The bathroom door was half open. I moved slowly toward it, step by step, desperately trying to remember which floorboards creaked and which were silent. When I was close enough, I stood to one side of the doorway and peered through the steam into the bathroom. I couldn’t see Danny anywhere. I entered the room. Water was starting to run down the sides of the tub. The bath was full to the brim. I turned off the taps and walked out onto the landing.
Searching methodically, I opened each door on the first floor. None of them contained Danny. That only left our bedroom at the top of the house. I walked up the remaining flight and found him lying on our bed, fully clothed and snoring softly. His lips were parted as if he were about to make an “Ah” sound. His arms were spreadeagled, and the fingers of his right hand were still entwined around the Kimber.
I inched closer to the bed, expecting Danny to jerk awake and point my own handgun at me. But his eyes remained closed, his mouth gaped, and his chest rose and fell gently until I was close enough to stab him. I looked down at him, trying to work out where to inflict the wound. Would cutting his throat work best? Perhaps, but I didn’t have the stomach for that. The thought of sawing through his windpipe made me feel ill.
If I plunged the knife into the left side of his chest, through his shirt, it would pierce his heart but might only feel like poking him. So that was what I decided to do. I held the blade high, left hand clasped over my right, and prepared to deliver the fatal blow.
While I took aim, I thought about what I was doing. This was Danny, whom I didn’t hate and had once really liked. Yes, he’d stolen my girl
friend from me, but I couldn’t condemn him for that. In the end, Caro had dumped him, a ruinous blow from which he had clearly never recovered. All right, Danny had called me lots of names. He had burned down my shop. But unhappiness makes men reckless. Did he deserve to die for being in pain?
No. But I still needed to get rid of him. He was a deranged person who knew that Caro and I had committed murder. With my eyes averted, I slammed the knife down into Danny’s chest. There was a crack, and half the blade broke off and flew across the bed. The knife had broken on Danny’s bones.
Danny drew in breath sharply, opened his eyes, and sat up. He looked at the broken knife in my hands, opened his shirt, and found a fresh scratch on his sternum that was beaded with blood.
“It’s not how it looks,” I protested.
“You stab me, then tell me it’s not how it looks? Okay, pansy boy. If it’s not how it looks, how is it? Eh? How the fuck is it?”
Danny scowled in contempt as he leveled the gun at my belly.
“It’s funny,” I said, “how you keep using words like ‘pansy’ as an insult. Because when we were at school, you were one of the few teachers with liberal views. You always taught us that names like queer and nigger and paki were invented to dehumanize minorities and make it easier to hate them.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You were a pretty inspirational guy. Danny. What the fuck happened to you?”
“I was struck by lightning, man. The same fucking bolt that hit you.” Abruptly, Danny’s expression changed. The dark loathing in his face gave way to a look of dejection. “You didn’t actually want to kill me, did you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Caroline forced you to do it, didn’t she? Come on. Be honest with me.”
I tried not to respond, but Danny must have read the answer in my eyes, for he nodded and said, “Oh, I don’t blame you. She can be very persuasive. She once asked me to do the same thing to you. When I’d started seeing her and you wouldn’t stop following her around, she begged me to kill you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
