It wasn’t guilt which pierced her then, it was his unsuspecting look - the look of someone expecting to enjoy the refuge of home at the end of a long day. He couldn’t see her for the dimness. He wasn’t as keen-eyed as a patrolman should be, Claire found herself thinking as she stumbled to face the chair and drag it out of the doorway. That was as much as she achieved before he admitted himself to the house. “Claire?” he called. “Sorry I was longer than I said. Some old dear thought a chap was acting suspicious, but when I tracked him down would you believe he was one of our patrol. Where are you?”
“In here.”
“I’ll put the light on, shall I? No need for you to sit in the dark, love.” He came into the room and reached for the switch, but faltered. “Good Lord, what’s . . . who . . .”
Claire found his hand with one of hers and used them to press the switch down. “My God, that’s Duncan Gummer, isn’t it?” he gasped, and his hand squirmed free. “Claire, what have you done?”
“I hope I’ve killed him.”
Wilf stared at her as if he no longer knew what he was seeing, then ventured to stand over the body. He’d hardly begun to stoop to it when he recoiled and hurried to draw the curtains. He held onto them for some seconds, releasing them only when their rail started to groan. “Why, Claire? What could -”
“It wasn’t half of what he did to Laura.”
“He -” Wilf’s face convulsed so violently it appeared to jerk his head down as he took a step towards Gummer. Claire thought he meant to kick the corpse, but he controlled himself enough to raise his head. “How do you know?”
“His mother lied about his alibi. Either she said she was awake when she was asleep or she knew he wasn’t at home when he said he was, when - when he . . .”
“All right, love. It’s all right.” Wilf veered around the body and offered her his hands, though not quite close enough for her to touch. “How did you find that out?”
“She let it slip one day and he tried to shut her up.”
“Why couldn’t you have told the police?”
“I did.”
“You - oh, I get you.” He was silent while he dealt with this, and Claire took the opportunity to retrieve her glass, not to finish her drink but to place it out of danger on the sideboard. Gummer’s body seemed such a fixture of the room that she was practically unaware of blotting out her sense of it as she picked up the glass. The clunk of the tumbler on wood recalled Wilf from his thoughts, and he said almost pleadingly “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What would you have done?”
He stepped forward and took her hands at last. “What do you think? When the police didn’t listen, probably the same as you. Only I wouldn’t have done it here where it can’t be hidden.”
“It’s done now. It can’t be helped, and I don’t want it to be.”
“I wish to God you’d left it to me.” He stared around the room, so that she thought he was desperate for a change of subject until he said “What did you use?”
“The gin. The bottle, I mean. It did some good for a change.”
“I won’t argue with that.”
Nevertheless he relinquished one of her hands. Before she knew what he intended, he was hefting the bottle as though to convince himself it had been the weapon. “Don’t,” she protested, then saw her concern was misplaced. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Your fingerprints would be on it anyway.”
“So would yours.”
“What are you getting -”
“Just listen while I think. We haven’t much time. The longer we wait before we call the police, the worse this is going to look.”
“Wilf, it can’t look any worse than it is.”
“Listen, will you. We can’t have you going to prison. You’d never survive.”
“I’ll have to do my best. When everyone knows the truth -”
“Maybe they won’t. You used to think he was sniffing round you. Suppose that got out somehow? I know how lawyers think. They’ll twist anything they can.”
“He wasn’t interested in me. It was Laura.”
“You say that, but how can you prove it in court? Your instincts are enough for you, I know that, for me too if I even need to tell you. But they won’t be enough if his mother sticks to her story, and if your lawyer tried to break her down too much think how that would look, them harassing an old woman with nobody left in the world.”
“All right, you’ve shown me how wrong I am,” Claire said, feeling not far short of betrayed. “Any suggestions?”
“More than a suggestion.”
He reached out and drew his hand down her cheek in a slow caress as he used to when they hadn’t long been married, then patted her face before sidling around her into the hall. She had no idea of his intentions until he unhooked the phone. “Wilf -”
“It’s all right. I’m going to make it all right. Hello.” Though he was gazing so hard at her it stopped her in the doorway, the last word wasn’t addressed to her. “Detective Inspector Bairns, please.”
“Wilf, wait a minute. Ring off before he can tell who you are. Don’t stay anything till we’ve -”
“Inspector? It’s Wilfred Maynard. I’ve killed the man who took our daughter from us.”
Claire grabbed the doorframe as her knees began to shake. She would have snatched the phone from him if it hadn’t been too late. Instead she sent herself into the room as soon as she felt safe to walk. She could hardly believe it, but she was hoping she hadn’t killed Gummer after all. She fastened her fingertips on the wrist of the sprawled empty flesh. She held it longer than made sense, she even said a prayer, but it was no use. The lump of flesh and muscle was already growing cold, and there wasn’t the faintest stirring of life within.
“I’ll be staying here, Inspector. I give you my word. I wouldn’t have called you otherwise,” she heard Wilf say. She walked on her unwieldy brittle legs into the hall in time to see him hang the receiver. “Wilf,” she pleaded, “what have you done?”
“Saved as much that we’ve got as I could. I know I can take prison better than you can. Quick now, before they come. Help me get my tale straight. How did you bring him here? Was he just passing or what?”
She thought of refusing to answer so that Wilf couldn’t prepare a story, but the possibility that their last few minutes together might be wasted in arguing was unbearable. “I called him at home.”
“Will Mrs Gummer know?”
“He said she’d be wondering where he’d got to.”
“You hadn’t long come in from gardening, had you? Did anyone see him arrive?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Just say he stopped when he saw you gardening and you invited him in. And when you’d both had a drink you accused him over Laura, and I came home just in time to hear him say what?”
“I don’t know. Wilf -”
“ ‘You can’t prove anything.’ That’s as good as a confession, isn’t it, or it was for me at any rate. He was shouting, so he didn’t hear me, because I let myself in quietly to find out what the row was. How many times did you hit him?”
“Do you have to be so calculating about it? I feel as if I’m already in court.”
“I have to know, don’t I? How many times?”
“It just took the once.”
“That’s fine, Claire. Really it is.” He offered her his hands again, and finding no response, let them sink. “It’ll be manslaughter. I heard Laura’s name and him saying you couldn’t prove it, and that was enough. There was a moment when I lost control, and then it was done and there was no turning back. That’s how it must have been for you, am I right? They’ll believe me because that’s how these things happen.”
He must be trying to live through her experience, but she felt no less alone. “Do they, Wilf?”
“Wait, I’ve got it. They’ll believe me because I couldn’t have had any other reason to kill him. It’s not as though I could have imagined anything was going on between you two,
even if you did imagine he fancied you.”
Even in the midst of their situation, that felt cruel to her. “Thank you, Wilf.”
“I have to say it, haven’t I? Otherwise they might get the wrong idea. Look, there’s a good chance the court will be lenient, and if it isn’t I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a public outcry. And I can’t imagine I’ll have too bad a time of it in jail. It’s his kind that suffer the worst in there, not the ones who’ve dealt with them.”
“You sound as though you’re looking forward to being locked up.”
“What a thing to say, Claire. How could anyone feel like that?”
As she’d spoken she’d known the remark was absurd, yet his need to persuade her it was made it seem less so. “Why would I want anything that’s going to take me away from you?” he said.
Claire had a sense of hearing words that didn’t quite go with the movements of his mouth. No, not with those - with his thoughts. Before she could ponder this, she heard several cars braking sharply outside the house, and a rapid slamming of at least six doors. “Here they are,” Wilf said.
The latch of the gate clicked, and then it sounded as though not much less than an army marched up the path. The doorbell rang once, twice. The Maynards looked at each other with a deference that felt to Claire like prolonging the last moment of their marriage as it had been. Then Wilf moved to open the door.
Bairns was on the step, and came in at once. Five of his colleagues followed, trying to equal his expressionlessness, and Claire didn’t know when the house had felt so crowded. “He’s in the front room, Inspector,” Wilf said.
“If you and Mrs Maynard would stay here.” Bairns’ gaze had already turned to his colleagues, and a nod sent two of them to stand close to the Maynards. He paced into the front room and lingered just inside, hands behind his back, as a prelude to squatting by Gummer’s body. He hardly touched it before standing up, and Claire felt as if he’d confirmed her loathing of it. “I must ask you to accompany us to the police station, Mr Maynard,” he said.
“I’m ready.”
“You too, Mrs Maynard, if you will. You’ll understand if I ask you not to travel in the same car.”
“In that case do you mind if I give my wife a cuddle, Inspector? I expect it may be her last for a while.”
The policeman’s impassiveness almost wavered as he gave a weighty nod. Wilf took hold of Claire’s shoulders and drew her to him. For a moment she was afraid to hug him with all the fierceness in her, and couldn’t quite think why. Of course, he’d scratched himself with his patrolman’s badge that night on the golf course. The scratches would have healed by now, not that she had seen his bare chest for years. When he put his arms around her she responded, and felt him trying to lend her strength, and telling her silently to support his version of events. They remained embraced for a few seconds after Bairns cleared his throat, then Wilf patted her back and pushed her away gently. “We’d best get this over and done with then, Inspector.”
Bairns had been delegating men to drive the Maynards. He directed an unambiguously sympathetic glance at Claire before turning a more purposeful look on Wilf. Wilf was going to convince him, she thought - had already convinced him. She had never realised her husband could be so persuasive when he had to be. She saw him start towards the front door, matching his pace to that of his escort as though he was taking his first steps to his cell. Her sense of his persuasiveness spread through her mind, and in that instant she knew everything.
“I’ll drive you whenever you’re ready, Mrs Maynard,” a youngish policeman murmured, but Claire was unable to move. She knew why Wilf had seemed relieved at the prospect of the sentence he was courting - because he’d been afraid he might be jailed for worse. Everything made its real sense now. Nobody had been more obsessed with the way Laura dressed and was developing than Wilf. Claire remembered accusing Gummer of being attracted to a girl as a preferred version of an older woman she resembled. The accusation had been right, but not the man.
“Mrs Maynard?”
She saw Wilf’s back jerking rhythmically away from her, and imagined its performing such a movement in the bunker. For a moment she was certain she could emerge from her paralysis only by flying at him - but she was surrounded by police who would stop her before she could finish him off, and she had no proof. She’d nursed her rage until tonight, she had hidden it from the world, and she could do so again. She felt pregnant with its twin, which would have years to develop. “I’m ready now,” she said, and took her first step as her new self.
Wilf was being handed into the nearest police car as she emerged from the house. Shut him away, she thought, keep him safe for me. His door slammed, then the driver’s, but apart from a stirring of net curtains the activity went unacknowledged by the suburb. As Claire lowered herself stiffly into the next car, Wilf was driven off. One thing he needn’t worry about was her confirming his tale. She would be waiting when he came out of prison, and she could take all that time to imagine what she would do then. Perhaps she would have a chance to practise. While she was waiting she might find other men like him.
The Entertainment (1999)
By the time Shone found himself back in Westingsea he was able to distinguish only snatches of the road as the wipers strove to fend off the downpour. The promenade where he’d seen pensioners wheeled out for an early dose of sunshine, and backpackers piling into coaches that would take them inland to the Lakes, was waving isolated trees that looked too young to be out by themselves at a gray sea baring hundreds of edges of foam. Through a mixture of static and the hiss on the windscreen a local radio station advised drivers to stay off the roads, and he felt he was being offered a chance. Once he had a room he could phone Ruth. At the end of the promenade he swung the Cavalier around an old stone soldier drenched almost black and coasted alongside the seafront hotels.
There wasn’t a welcome in sight. A sign in front of the largest and whitest hotel said NO, apparently having lost the patience to light up its second word. He turned along the first of the narrow streets of boardinghouses, in an unidentifiable one of which he’d stayed with his parents most of fifty years ago, but the placards in the windows were just as uninviting. Some of the streets he remembered having been composed of small hotels had fewer buildings now, all of them care homes for the elderly. He had to lower his window to read the signs across the roads, and before he’d finished his right side was soaked. He needed a room for the night—he hadn’t the energy to drive back to London. Half an hour would take him to the motorway, near which he was bound to find a hotel. But he had only reached the edge of town, and was braking at a junction, when he saw hands adjusting a notice in the window of a broad three-story house.
He squinted in the mirror to confirm he wasn’t in anyone’s way, then inched his window down. The notice had either fallen or been removed, but the parking area at the end of the short drive was unoccupied, and above the high thick streaming wall a signboard that frantic bushes were doing their best to obscure appeared to say most of HOTEL. He veered between the gateposts and came close to touching the right breast of the house.
He couldn’t distinguish much through the bay window. At least one layer of net curtains was keeping the room to itself. Beyond heavy purple curtains trapping moisture against the glass, a light was suddenly extinguished. He grabbed his overnight bag from the rear seat and dashed for the open porch.
The rain kept him company as he poked the round brass bellpush next to the tall front door. There was no longer a button, only a socket harboring a large bedraggled spider that recoiled almost as violently as his finger did. He hadn’t laid hold of the rusty knocker above the neutral grimace of the letter-slot when a woman called a warning or a salutation as she hauled the door open. “Here’s someone now.”
She was in her seventies but wore a dress that failed to cover her mottled toadstools of knees. She stooped as though the weight of her loose throat was bringing her face, which was almost as white as her hai
r, to meet his. “Are you the entertainment?” she said.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 131
